Olympus Knights
by Heir of the void
Summary: In the wake of a great and pyrrhic victory, a squad of Tactical Surface Fighter pilots find themselves in the midst of a thousand wars of incomprehensible scale in a world of incredible darkness. Armed with the bonds that connect them (and giant robots), eight soldiers on the cusp of adulthood must fight together against the storm. But in the Time of Ending, all may be in vain...
1. Olympus Knights 00: Prelude

"Nuclear Launch Confirmed." The flight controller announced. "Commence Operation Ascendant Storm."

"This is Windrunner 00 to Tower." Captain Michael Black said, speaking through his audio/visual communication system from the cockpit of his F-22A Raptor Tactical Surface Fighter. "Permission for takeoff?"

"Tower Actual to Windrunner 00, permission granted." The flight controller said. "Good hunting out there."

"Windrunner 00 to Windrunner Squadron." Michael said, opening a line to this squad. "Begin combat launch."

"Roger that!" Second Lieutenant Melissa Black responded. "Standing by."

Michael pushed the control yokes of his TSF forward, flaring the engines and jump units. His humanoid fighting machine took one step forward, then another, and then his lift drive reached full power and the weight of his machine lifted off its feet.

Increasing engine power further, Michael was pushed back into his seat by acceleration forces as his TSF raced toward the end of the runway. A few hundred feet before the end of the pavement, his machine began to lift off into the air.

"Clear for launch!" Melissa said, as her own YF-23 Black Widow II began to take off, the twenty-meter-tall grey humanoid weapon shooting forward on jets of blue flame.

"I'm taking off." Lieutenant Miharu Kuroda said quietly, as her Shiranui Second began accelerating down the runway.

"Well, here I go." Lily Knight said, her F-15E Strike Eagle rocketing forward.

As all eight members of Radiant Squadron took to the air and entered formation, Michael took a deep breath and opened a general address channel to the Squadron.

"Alright, people." Michael said. "Intel has decided that the BETA are massing for something in Normandy. A few hundred thousand of them, at least. Given that we are the only operation in this part of the world, Command figures London's next on the menu. We're here to change that."

Michael opened a map of the area as the ground transited to water beneath the squadron. "We've launched a wave of nuclear-tipped tomahawks mixed in with some decoys to annihilate the largest concentrations of BETA forces. We're to follow on the heels of the missiles, relatively speaking, and as soon as the shock waves clear, move through the affected areas and strike the BETA rear ranks."

"What about the radiation?" Miharu asked. "Won't that be dangerous?"

"We're using an airburst, which will minimize the lingering contamination." Natasha Markov, the Russian pilot said. "And our Tactical Surface Fighters provide immense radiation shielding. We will be fine."

"Well said." Michael said. "In any case, Heavy Laser-Class BETA have been spotted in the operational area, so keep your heads down. However, if we can neutralize them, HQ said we might be able to get some naval rifle or ballistic missile support. Just remember that you you absolutely must get your money's worth with atomic weapons, so we can't screw this up. Remember your jobs, and don't get cocky. That's all from me."

"Intel also reports a high density of regular Laser-class." Lieutenant Keter Maxwell, the Israeli _Laserjagd_ , or Laser Class Hunter, pilot said. "They're fragile, so the nuke should give us some breathing room, but stay low and don't take safety for granted."

"My drones will map the area and find the laser blighters." Cynthia Elswood said confidently, her British accent giving the statement an odd charm. "Then we can dig them out and start exterminating."

"Spend your drones wisely." Sigrid Von Essen, the German combat engineering specialist, said. "Failure is unacceptable."

"Don't get killed, though." Michael said. "We're running short on everything as is."

"Of course." Melissa said. "We'll kill every single one of the alien bastards and live to tell the story. I'm sure of it."

"Don't get too cocky, mate." Lily said, as the far shore came into view in the distance.

"Drop to wavetop flying." Michael ordered, lowering the head of his Raptor and dropping down to just a few feet above the whitecaps, the rest of Windrunner Squadron following suit.

There was a small chance that the BETA had deployed Laser-class along the coast, but that would be atypical. However, it cost nothing to be careful here.

Michael glanced at his readout. The missile Windrunner Squadron was tailing had crossed over onto land and was approaching the detonation point. As the bluffs lining the coast began to become clearer in the distance, Michael began to decelerate, his squadmates doing the same an instant later.

They needed to arrive promptly, but it never paid to be too close to a nuclear explosion. He watched his timer count down as the missile drew closer to the detonation point.

The beach drew nearer quickly now, and Michael could clearly make out the details of the cliffs on his monitors. As he passed over the breaking point of the waves, the jump units on the legs of his TSF swung forward, helping him kill his forward momentum.

Coming to a stop halfway up the beach, Michael lowered the engine output of his TSF and descended, then cut power a few feet off the ground and landed. On either side of him, the rest of Windrunner Squadron did likewise.

"Advance to the bluffs and take cover facing the Ocean, just like they told us in the briefing." Michael said, walking forward toward the cliffs.

"You know," Melissa said slowly, "We're right in the middle of Omaha Beach. The bloodiest landing sector of the whole operation."

"A lot of good men died storming this patch of sand." Cynthia said, as the squad took up positions at the base of the cliff, the edifice of stone rising more than a hundred feet into the air, far more than enough to shield their TSFs. "And not a word out of you, Sigrid."

Sigrid frowned slightly but said nothing.

"Um, the missile is almost at the detonation point." Miharu said quietly.

[x]

The Block V Tomahawk cruise missile dodged and jinked wildly as it shot across the landscape of Northern France. It was toward the rear of the salvo of ten missiles, and the only one carrying a deadly thermonuclear warhead. The other missiles served as decoys, and relayed status information to the main missile.

The missile lanced between the hulking forms of two inactive Destroyer-Class BETA, their massive green frontal carapaces of organic armor facing the ocean. It was past them an instant later, and a few seconds after that, its moment had come.

Redlining its engine, the missile dropped its tail and swung its nose upward as it ignited its auxiliary rocket booster, rising away from the ground on a plume of superheated gas.

Almost immediately, the massive bulbous eyes of the dozens of Laser-Class BETA within line of sight of the rising missile snapped toward it. Another instant passed, and the otherworldly reaction that allowed the creatures to produce their devastating beam began in every one of the monsters.

It was too late. The Tomahawk reached its target altitude, just over a mile above the surface. Electrical impulses flowed through the device. An egg of high explosives detonated.

There was light.

And the world turned to fire.

[x]

A flash of light filled the sky, reflecting off the ocean and giving it, for a brief second, the appearance of a vast expanse of molten gold.

"Detonation confirmed." Cynthia said as the light faded. "Blast wave ETA is forty seconds."

"Do you think it worked?" Natasha asked, grinning.

"It had better." Melissa said. "That was a W108 at maximum fusion boosting. Thirteen hundred and fifty kilotons. Effective kill radius of over ten miles for exposed human targets. I think we at least took a bite out of them."

"Yeah." Miharu said. "I hope so."

"I don't know." Lily said. "I think you guys worry too much. We've all got plenty of ammo, and they're sending in the whole damn Seventh Army behind us. I think we'll be fine."

"That's no excuse to relax." Keter said. "We are the spearpoint of this operation. Victory today could hinge on our actions."

"Brace for blast wave." Cynthia said calmly.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the pressure front blasted over the heads of Windrunner Squadron and out to sea, louder than the takeoff of a cargo jet. There was a moment of peace, then, with a sound like the world inhaling, air began to rush back towards the distant source of the blast, drawn in by the vacuum created as the explosion pushed air away.

Windrunner Squadron weathered the storm in their pocket of calm, their massive machines more than a match for the relatively minor forces exerted on them.

As the air stilled, Michael glanced down at his clock and saw that only ten seconds had passed since the arrival of the blast. He checked the status of his unit; everyone was reporting green.

"One hundred seconds to mission start." Michael said. "Command wants us to take some time for the dust to settle and for SpaceCom to get a decent picture of what's on the ground. You know the mission, and you know the stakes. Over."

Michael killed his comms unit and took his hands off his control yokes, closing his eyes. It was actually happening. He wasn't simply going into battle, he was leading others into the inferno. He was no longer simply putting his own life on the line.

He breathed slowly and evenly, fighting to keep panic from gaining a foothold. He needed to be at his best. Nothing else would suffice. He had only known the other members of Windrunner Squadron for a few weeks, but in that short time he had come to know that, beyond a shadow of doubt, they deserved a far better commander than he could ever be.

 _But you're what they have._ Something whispered to him. _And there is little enough else to go around. But if you give in and abandon your duty, they won't even have that. The choice is obvious._

Michael opened his eyes and, with herculean effort, began pushing his anxiety and fear back into its box. He didn't know how long he could fight it, but he would not lose today.

As the countdown approached zero, Michael looked at each member of his squad in turn. How many of them would survive the coming battle? How many of them would even be there, were the circumstances even slightly less desperate?

Michael took a deep breath as he re-opened his comms, and then the timer hit zero.

"Commence Operation!" He declared, false confidence suffusing his voice. "Good luck and good hunting."

"Acknowledged." Keter said. "Lifting off."

Engines roared to full power and jump units flared as the eight massive machines of Windrunner Squadron lifted off from Omaha Beach and into a world of desolation.

"Commencing drone operations." Cynthia said, as two small devices detached from the shoulders of her TSF and zipped away.

"Advance!" Michael ordered.

His jump units swung upwards, and he began to move inland, the rest of the squad following in an arrowhead pattern, with Lily on the inside and above the rest of the group.

Rising into the sky ahead of the squad was a near-perfect textbook example of a mushroom cloud, its cap reaching miles into the atmosphere and spreading outwards in all directions.

Michael angled upwards, and the squad began to gain altitude. The cloud would obscure them from Laser-class, and a higher altitude would mean picking up less radioactive contamination.

As he leveled out at cruising altitude, Michael took advantage of the opportunity to survey the ground spread below him. The area had been empty of human inhabitants for some time, but that was impossible to see now. The blast had left nothing untouched, obviating the details needed to make such fine judgements.

However, the signs of BETA presence were pervasive and overwhelming. The corpses of thousands of Destroyer-class BETA, gathered in ex-herds scattered liberally across the landscape, were the most obvious. There forms were slumped and blackened, their massive frontal carapaces pointing towards the ocean, having provided their bodies with no protection from the bomb.

The slain Grappler-Class were far more dispersed, rarely in groups larger than five or so. Their wide bodies left them with more area to absorb radiation and pressure from the blast, a fact evident in the hideous damage covering each of the creatures.

In the distance, a pair of colossal Fort-Class lay on their sides, dead or dying. Of the small strains, there were no signs.

Windrunner Squadron continued to fly, pilots silent, making only minor adjustments to account for the immense thermal updrafts created by the fields of fire below.

They skirted around the epicenter of the blast, but as they drew closer to the site of the detonation, the ash and smoke in the air began to kill visibility, plunging the squad into a sort of strange twilight.

Michael flew more by his instruments than his monitors. The only assurance he had that his squad still existed somewhere in the haze that surrounded him were the seven steady green dots on his Heads Up Display that kept an even pace with him as he tracked inland.

They passed within a mile of the epicenter of the blast, and the dust began to clear as they continued.

"Cynthia, what are you getting from your drones?" Michael asked, glancing at his readings on the dust cloud. "Anything?"

"You can understand the mess outside makes my job somewhat difficult." Cynthia responded. "But I don't see anything."

"Great." Michael muttered. "We should be starting to see survivors soon, though. If anyone sees anything-"

He was cut off as a blaring alarm filled his cockpit.

"LASER ALARM!" He shouted, entering an emergency dive. "GET DOWN!"

As Michael opened his mouth, Keter was already in motion. Her jump units flared as she redlined her engine, and three small canisters shot away from her TSF as she rocketed ahead of the formation.

The canisters detonated, releasing clouds of anti-laser smoke as the squad, sans Keter, hit the deck. She rocketed her Strike Eagle to the side, stabilizing as a massive beam of brilliant light split the heavens a few dozen meters away from her.

Keter raised her Assault Cannon as the beam faded, aimed for a fraction of a second, then fired her 120mm cannon twice in quick succession.

A pair of fin-stabilized semi-active base bleed tissue-piercing high explosive shells vanished into the haze down the path of the beam.

As soon as she finished firing, Keter launched into a fast vertical climb, then spun to the east as she jetted in the opposite direction, killing her climb as she aimed her Assault Cannon and fired twice more.

Beginning to fall, Keter reversed her rotation, bringing her rifle around and discharging the last two rounds in the magazine.

Keter turned her fall into a controlled dive as she ejected the 120mm magazine from her gun and loaded a fresh one. Pulling out of her dive at the last second, she rejoined the rest of the formation in nape-of-the-earth flying.

"Reporting three Heavy Laser-Class targets destroyed, sir." Keter said. "Also, BETA combat forms are approaching in Regiment strength, about ten minutes from our current position."

"Good work." Michael said, reviewing the data that Keter had sent him. "Everyone, prepare to engage. We're going to try a flanking attack; I'm broadcasting the flight path now."

A moment passed as the rest of the squad looked over the battle plan.

"Wow." Melissa said, sounding surprised. "This is actually really good!"

"What do you mean?" Michael asked, narrowing his eyes.

"It just seems so... great. I'm so proud that you've mastered that strategery stuff!"

"That isn't a word." Sigrid muttered.

"Shutup, Nazi." Melissa said. "Anyway, it looks like a good plan. I don't have any problems with it."

"So, Keter and I go deep and eliminate the laser class and stragglers while the rest of you hit the main force on all sides, and we all meet in the middle, right?" Lily asked, switching out one of her Assault Cannons for a heavier 88mm rapid fire battle rifle.

"Correct." Michael said. "In the main group, Cynthia is with Natasha on the frontal attack, Miharu is with Melissa on the east flank, and Sigrid is with me on the west. Now, let's roll out."

"Yessir." Windrunner Squadron chorused, engines flaring as they lifted off.

Lily and Keter shot away to the south at close to the maximum safe speed for the area. The rest of the squad split into elements as they followed at a more sedate pace, Natasha and Cynthia dropping back to behind the other two elements.

The distance between the human an alien forces closed quickly. They didn't have eyes-on observation of the BETA, but given their observed behavior, a projected position was probably more than enough.

Michael came out from behind a hill, and before him was a swarm of BETA.

Wireframe shells briefly appeared over each of the BETA as the Raptor's Automated Threat Assessment counted the targets and analyzed their disposition. Of the BETA Michael could see, most were Grappler-Cass and Tank-Class, all facing northward.

Michael smiled slightly as his grip tightened on his controls. "Contact." He said calmly. "Targets have merged. Engaging."

Turning to face the BETA herd and skewing his Jump Units to carry him parallel to their course, Michael began painting, designating, and prioritizing targets as his Mount Pylons unfolded into forward firing position and the arms of his TSF raised their weapons.

Then the storm broke. Four 36mm chainguns began spewing twenty-one ounce shells at rate of more than six hundred rounds per minute. Each. The less mobile guns on the extended Mount Pylons targeted the larger Grappler-Class, while the more precise arm guns engaged the Tank-Class.

The four-gun technique was a difficult one, that required a cutting-edge TSF, high natural ability, and insane amounts of practice. It had taken Michael a long time to master the technique, but the results were more than worthwhile.

He had wanted to get one of the Foil Mythic Rare YF-23 limited production units so he could go to six guns at once, but being assigned to one of the Black Widow II TSFs required a level of CQC ability that Michael 'demonstrated a complete and enduring lack' of.

When that failed, Michael had begun campaigning to have the base mechanics add a couple/few/dozen 20mm chainguns on the body and shoulder blocks of his TSF to give him some extra stopping power against Laser and Tank-Class BETA. Any desire to break the world record for multi-wielding firearms was completely irrelevant.

Unfortunately, unlicensed major modifications to multi-million dollar war machines were... 'Frowned Upon'.

Michael slaughtered Grapplers by the dozens and Tanks by the Bushel as he strafed down the unprepared alien formation, carefully backing away as the BETA began to react to his presence and turn to attack him.

Just as the ammo counters for all his weapons dropped below seven hundred rounds, the first of the enemy Grapplers broke into a charge.

Michael fell back into a full tactical retrograde, his arcs of fire widening as the enemy sought to surround him. He prioritized his fire on the Grapplers as he accelerated above the maximum speed of a Tank-Class BETA.

Firing in precise, controlled, five-round bursts, mindful of ammunition consumption, Michael continued to drop BETA.

He was doing pretty well, until he ran out of ammo.

As his guns went silent, the BETA began to close in on Michael.

He smiled slightly. "Whirlwind." He muttered.

The form of a Tactical Surface Fighter shot out from behind a partially collapsed nearby building, quickly resolving itself as Sigrid's steel-grey EF-2000 Typhoon. It carried a massive BWS-8 Flugelberte battle axe in each hand, and both its Mount Pylons were unfolded, pointing Assault Cannons forward as she charged, guns blazing.

Sigrid closed to melee range shockingly quickly. A Grappler-Class sprang forward, raising both its pick-like armored forearms to crush her machine.

Shifting to the side, Sigrid evaded the attack and continued forward, swinging her axe as she passed. She hit the Grappler between two sets of legs, the massive head of her axe smashing nearly all the way through the creature, killing it instantly.

"Whirlwind acknowledged, Captain." Sigrid said, voice cool.

Strafing to the side again, Sigrid swung her other axe down between the claws of a Grappler, crushing its skull and destroying its brain. She fired a long burst from her Assault Cannons as she shifted backwards, spinning to face a pair of Grapplers that had been moving to attack her flank.

Jump units flaring, Sigrid sprang into the air, cresting above the claws to the Grapplers. She swung her axes downward as she fell, shattering the spines of both BETA.

Michael sprang into action as Sigrid touched down. He sprang into the air, raising his Assault Cannons as his field of view expanded. Though he had expended all his 36mm rounds, he still had full magazines of 120mm cannon shells, all fully loaded with airburst canister shot.

This was the Whirlwind Doctrine. It was a recent refinement of the Hi-Low Active Defense Doctrine designed to make the most of the increasing abilities of human TSFs and the skills of veteran or prodigy pilots.

Just as a storm existed only in the motion of its winds, the Whirlwind Doctrine emphasized leveraging movement to maximize both lethality and survivability. However, it required that a pilot not only possess high technical skill, but also the situational awareness and tactical ability to avoid being overwhelmed, and to protect comrades from the same.

As Michael reached the peak of his jump, he began analyzing the dense swarm of Tank-Class following the Grapplers into battle. Picking out the thickest clusters of BETA, he began to fire his 120mm cannons. Each round flew through the air the air as a single unit, until it reached a point several hundred yards from its target. There, a bursting charge detonated, blasting the twelve hundred tungsten balls in the shell into and expanding cone of death.

Each cone intersected the ground in a long ellipse. Projectiles fell in a hideous and wonderful parody of rain, shredding flesh and smashing stone with equal impunity. In the seven seconds it took to complete the volley, hundreds of Tank-Class BETA were reduced to a range of conditions not suitable for continued kinetic action.

Instants later, Michael touched down and began reassessing the situation. Sigrid had slain several more Grappler-Class during his brief fire mission, but fresh creatures continued to approach the duo, moving to surround and overwhelm them.

Michael lowered his guns.

Even before the weapons came to rest, sub-arms retrieving full magazines helpfully ejected from his TSF's ammunition compartments and locking them into place on the weapons. Within seconds, he was back in action.

Springing forward in a long, low boosted jump, Michael fired a burst into a Grappler that was closing on Sigrid from behind, dropping it, then spun to engage another.

Sigrid and Michael continued to advance into the BETA swarm in a curving pattern, cutting down the monsters as they moved. Michael conserved ammo, letting Sigrid make most of the kills with her axes. He kept expecting Destroyer-Class BETA to appear, which would complicate their strategy, but they never came.

Instead, a Grappler exploded, splattering Michael with bits of... something. Its body tumbled, forward, revealing a gore-basted Su-37 Terminator with its fist held in a punch position, blade motor out. A considerably cleaner EF-2000 Typhoon holding an Assault Cannon in firing position with its right arm and a dripping Flugelberte battle axe with its other.

"Reporting objective completion, Captain." Cynthia said, shooting a Grappler in the face. "Enemy Destroyer battle line broken, with insufficient surviving hostiles for significant recovery."

"Good work." Michael said, continuing to fire in support of Sigrid.

"You should have been there, Comrade." Natasha said. "It was glorious. The Destroyers had their backs to us, and we went through them like KGB through countercultural scum."

"Awesome." Michael said, picking out a target from among the dwindling swarm of BETA and eliminating it. "Any word on-"

Chaingun fire filled the air, and four TSFs landed from boosted jumps a short distance away from Michael, his HUD tagging them as the remaining members of the squad.

"I think that's the last of them." Lily said, her jump units folding back into their normal position. "We took out the Laser-Class no problem, so we linked up with those two and helped them clear their sector."

"So, what now, Captain?" Melissa asked. "You've always been the smart one. Do we continue inland, or should we hold this position and wait for the main force?"

"Um... Commander?" Miharu said, voice wavering. "I'm picking up some odd vibration readings. I don't know exactly what they are, but..."

"Wait." Cynthia said, raising her foot and stomping the ground in front of her, deploying a field-expedient seismic sensor spike. "Miharu, send me those readings."

She did, and there was silence for a moment as Cynthia poured over the information. Michael nervously tapped his fingers on the control yoke of his TSF, looking at the strategic information downlink.

"It's faint, and there's a lot of interference, but I think I've got it." Cynthia said. "It sounds like a couple of low-depth tunneling signatures, although they're pretty echoey, like there's a lot of open space down there. Nothing to worry about."

"It- What?" Michael shouted. "How many signatures? Where?"

"Not sure. I think it might be three for four-"

Michael exhaled. That wasn't as bad as it could have been.

"-dozen." Cynthia finished. "We're nowhere near the main defense lines, let alone the civilian or industrial areas. What is the problem?"

Michael didn't respond. He was already flipping open an innocuous button cover on the side of his control station. Jabbing the button with his finger, he cleared his throat.

"Windrunner Actual to Seventh Army Actual." Michael said, feeling the Sword of Damocles rising over his head. "Priority Flash. Priority Flash. Priority Flash."

He waited in silence for confirmation. If Cynthia was wrong, he was done. He could easily face a court martial for disrupting command during a major operation. If he was ignored, and unable to deliver the message, he could face the same fate, though he would likely be too dead to care.

There was a long beep.

"Son, I am in the middle of launching sixteen divisions from eight counties into the largest amphibious operation since Overlord. You have thirty seconds."

"Call off the landings, sir." Michael. "The BETA have an extensive underground network in this area, with active digging operations. In addition, they may have hollowed out chambers along these tunnels to conceal forces in the area. With the lowest numbers from past BETA tunneling operations, there could be more than half a million combat forms in the tunnels, above and beyond the surface formations we've seen."

As Michael began transmitting the collected data to the General, he felt a slight tremor run through the ground, accompanied by a massive crashing sound partially dampened by his cockpit systems. Looking up, he spotted several plumes of dust on the horizon, and one massive one just under a kilometer away from him.

"WE'VE GOT COMPANY!" Melissa shouted, reaching down to the skirt armor of her TSF and withdrawing an S-11 Explosive Device, something that she had most certainly _not_ been officially issued. As she armed the device and began to charge toward the hole, the General spoke again.

"Son, I am so very sorry." He said. "May we meet again in the place where warriors take their rest."

The line went dead. A moment later, Melissa threw the S-11 into the open tunnel like a hand grenade, the reversed course and jetted back towards the group. With a roar, the device detonated, blasting a column of dust out of the mouth of the tunnel.

Melissa reached the squad's line as the rest of them assumed defensive positions.

"What's the plan now, bro?" Melissa said, assuming a position in the line next to Michael.

"I'm not sure." Michael said, ignoring the violation of battlefield decorum. "We don't have retreat orders, but we can't hold here."

He shook his head. "But I'm worried that if we try to-"

He was interrupted by a chime as his HUD highlighted a pair of friendly units coming in from the south-west at high speed.

Michael could just begin to distinguish their shape when one of them seemed to twinkle, then begin to drop. A moment later, the other friendly exploded.

"Laser fire." Cynthia said. "I'm reading the heat signatures of dozens of laser batteries all over-"

She froze. "My God."

"What is it?" Melissa asked.

"They launched a G-Bomb."

"Where?" Melissa asked.

"Here!" Cynthia shouted. "The target point is practically on top of us!"

A Gravity Bomb. The most powerful weapon in humanity had against the BETA, the arcane devices created an immense blast eclipsing even the power of an atomic device. Rumor whispered that even the scientists who created the weapon had only a vague notion of its underlying principles, but everything that they did know was at the very highest levels.

Michael overlayed the blast pattern from Operation Lucifer on his map. At the best speeds they could make without being lasered, they would never make it out of the kill zone in time. There was no need to say anything; it was plain to see.

"Why would they do that?" Miharu whispered.

"Because it is the correct strategic decision." Sigrid said, looking down. "We killed over a hundred thousand BETA in the initial nuclear attack, and now we have revealed far more than half a million further enemy units concentrated in a small area, and we are posed to wipe them out at a stroke. Combined with the fact that every BETA reserve formation within eighty kilometers has likely come close enough to be caught in the effective radius of the gravatic device, a million enemy combatants could be neutralized in the course of a morning, without the main landing force firing a shot."

"The Lyons Hive Defensive Swarm is estimated at around 1.2 million combat forms, and we know they moved much of that north." Natasha said, barely suppressed emotion clear on her face. "And Lyons in the linchpin of the BETA presence in Western Europe. Neutralizing it on the heels of a victory like this could let us roll all the way to the Vistula River."

She laughed. "Not that we'd be there to see it."

"One brigade is a small price to pay for that." Keter said, not looking at the visual communicator.

"Impact in thirty seconds." Cynthia said with a stark, forlorn voice. "I have made peace with my God and die with no regrets. Rule Britannia, and glory to mankind."

Her line went dead, and communications icon on her status feed went black.

Michael watched the timer tick down. Above him, lances of coherent light stabbed at the sky, trying in vain to intercept a falling star. Even when a beam came close, its path bent off course as the air twisted around it, scattering it into a halo that flashed like lightning around the weapon.

Melissa opened a secure private connection to Michael. He looked up, seeing her eyes glisten on the video display.

"Michael, before we go... I need to say something."

"Yes?" Michael said.

Ten seconds.

"I love you." She said, voice wavering. "I always have, and I want you to be able to die knowing that."

"Of course." Michael said, shaking his head. "I love you too. You're my sister."

As Melissa began to form the first syllable of her response, the G-Bomb detonated a kilometer above and away from her. The world seemed to be shaken to its very foundations as the blast horizon of the bomb expanded at incomprehensible speed. Windrunner Squadron, eight of the most advanced tactical suits that mankind could create, was simply unmade by the blast and vanished like an idle daydream.

Then all was dust on the wind.

[x]

 **Seventh Army, I Corps, UN Joint Experimental Division, 1st Brigade Combat Team, Designated B "Windrunner" Squadron - Operation Ascendant Storm, Official Report**

STATUS:

 _Captain Michael Black - Killed In Action, With Honors_

 _Lieutenant Cynthia Elswood - Killed In Action, With Honors_

 _Lieutenant Sigrid von Essen - Killed In Action, With Honors_

 _Lieutenant Keter Maxwell - Killed In Action, With Honors_

 _Lieutenant Miharu Kuroda - Killed In Action, With Honors_

 _2nd Lieutenant Melissa Black - Killed In Action, With Honors_

 _2nd Lieutenant Natasha Markov - Killed In Action, With Honors_

 _2nd Lieutenant Lily Knight - Killed In Action, With Honors_

 _NOTES: Despite their relatively short time in contact with the enemy, the contributions of Windrunner Squadron to the victory at the Second Battle of Normandy, and therefore to the subsequent Purging of Lyons, Iberian Reconquista, and Drive on the Rhine, cannot be overstated._

 _Combat telemetry, while incomplete, lends credence to the theory that it was the action of Vanguard Squads, very likely Windrunner Squad, that provoked the BETA into moving early, saving the Seventh Army and dooming the BETA. Human forces reached the Mediterranean Coast within two weeks of the landing, just after Lyons Hive was disabled by a combination cruise missile and ballistic missile strike._

 _The fighting continued for some eight weeks thereafter but, with the exception of the fighting surrounding the Subjugation of Budapest Hive, the BETA were never able to mount a resistance as effective as during the opening days of the campaign._

 _The lines eventually stabilized in eastern Europe, with the crusading human armies eventually calling a halt along a front stretching from Kaliningrad to Odessa to consolidate their supply lines, rest the troops, and begin repairing and replacing equipment worn out from the campaign. Extensive fortifications were constructed along the front which, due to the numerous BETA offensives that were violently repelled, became known as the Stormwall._

 _However, even as this story, or perhaps these ten million stories, drew to a close, another tale had only just begun. Another story, in a world on an unimaginable scale and of incredible darkness. A story that would sweep up more people than even this one._

 _And in this case, the subject is science. And relationships. And warfare._

 _And things that are just ginormously huge and hard to grasp because space is like that._

 _ **Fiat Incipio.**_

 _-L. F. D._


	2. Olympus Knights 01: Alea Iacta Est

**Olympus Knights**

 **Chapter 01: Alea Iacta Est**

Awakening was a slow, gradual process, neurons freshly tracing only pathways and stumbling across familiar memory engrams. Eventually, the connections reached a critical mass, and Michael Black returned to the realm of the living with a sudden, shocked intake of breath.

He looked around frantically for a moment, before realizing that he was in the cockpit of his TSF, all the displays powered down. Hesitantly, he reached forward and tapped the activation button.

A hum filled the cockpit as the machine's systems began to power up and the displays began booting up. As it did so, he thought back to what had happened. The last thing he could remember was...

Getting vaporized. Great.

 _Is this death?_ He wondered, looking around at his cockpit fixtures, all of which seemed _off_ somehow. _Granted, it's something, but I didn't expect_ this.

The main visual array activated, filling his vision with a clear blue sky and a helpfully filtered sun rising in the distance. The proprioceptive feed from his TSF connected to his brain stem, and he discovered that the machine was lying on its back.

Michael shook his head, wondering how he hadn't noticed that. It explained a lot.

As the rest of the communication feeds came online, he frowned. There were no friendly tactical links within range, which could be explained easily enough. However, he also had no satellite downlink, which should have been available anywhere on the planet. It could have been explained by an equipment malfunction, but everything was reporting as fully operational.

Directing power to his limb motors, Michael began standing his TSF up. Something about maneuvering the machine felt different, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what it was.

Once his machine was fully upright, Michael began surveying the landscape. He appeared to be in the middle of a large temperate meadow, judging by the temperature readings and the lush grass around his feet. It clearly received a decent amount of rainfall, judging by the large forest in the distance, and had probably seen some weird shit recently, judging by the Tactical Surface Fighters lying here and there on the ground. Michael counted six of them in all.

Just as Michael began to wonder about how exactly that had happened, a contact appeared on his threat display. It blinked yellow for a moment, registering as UNKNOWN, until its IFF signature was confirmed and it switched to green. The system tagged it as LT2 MELISSA BLACK - [ERROR].

He glanced at the spot where the IFF signature said Melissa was supposed to be. Nothing, which was odd. The IFF transponder was about as complex as a rock and required about as much maintenance, and was doubly redundant. For it to have a positively identified phantom contact was...

At that moment, the air seemed to shimmer, then bend, and suddenly a Tactical Surface Fighter was standing in front of him, right where the friendly contact was.

It stood nearly twenty meters tall and had the same basic shape as the YF-23, but the similarities ended there. It had a fuller abdomen and thorax section and was generally bulkier, and also had fewer engine intake vents. Its forearm sensor pods were smaller, though it retained its jump units and seemed to have gained a _fifth_ mounting pylon on the center of its back, which carried its characteristic longsword. Each of the other four pylons held a rifle, and the machine carried a second longsword in its right hand and a rifle in the other, which looked very similar to the AMWS-24 used by the YF-23.

It armor was also a deep, gleaming black highlighted with luminescent green, which was most certainly not an official or approved color scheme for any U.S. units.

Then the glowing right eye of the machine winked, and Melissa's face appeared in a communication window in Michael's display.

"Hey!" She said grinning wildly. "Did you see that? Pretty neat, huh?"

"Yes." Michael muttered, shaking his head. "But I think we have more pressing concerns right now."

"What do you mean?" Melissa asked.

"We were just at ground zero of a G-Bomb detonation." Michael replied. "Aren't you the least bit curious about how we're still alive?"

Melissa shrugged. "Meh. I mean, we're alive, so why does it matter?"

"Alright." Michael said. "Then next on the list would be the question of where the Probably Not Hell we are. I don't have a satellite feed, I can't pick up anything on any of the military channels, and my _compass_ isn't working. And then there is the question of what happened to your TSF. It clearly isn't normal, and frankly WMD-applied paint jobs tend to suck, which yours doesn't."

"The plot thickens." Melissa said. "But you're one to talk about paintjobs, Sir Gunsalot."

"What are you talking about?"

The image of Melissa switched to one of her exterior camera feeds, showing an image of a Tactical Surface Fighter.

Much like Melissa's, it had a somewhat bulkier figure, but with more planar surfaces emphasized on its surface armor, which was colored a deep, burnished silver color. Glowing red lines traced a pattern across the surface of the machine, which gazed upon the world with eyes like burning emeralds.

"Huh." Michael said, looking at his TSF.

The remodeled machine cut a rather dashing and heroic figure, to be sure, but he was still bothered by the fact that it had happened at all.

"Anyway, I'm surprised that the paint job was the first thing you noticed." Melissa said. "Most of the other mods are way more dramatic. I'm not even sure this thing still counts as a Black Widow anymore."

"What are you talking about?" Michael asked. "What other modifications?"

"Didn't you see them on your exploded system diagnostic report?"

"Forgive me if I was too busy getting NUKED to visit a repair depot."

"Wait." Melissa said. "Are you saying that you don't run a full diagnostic when you start your TSF?"

Michael sighed. "Of course not."

"Then how do you know the mechanics didn't sabotage your robot?" Melissa asked.

"Because why would they." Michael said flatly, intoning it as a statement.

"Well, start one and take a look at mine." Melissa said, sending him a file.

Michael started the diagnostic, then opened the file with a shrug.

Then his jaw landed in his lap.

The frame of the machine had shifted slightly, but it and the armor layers of the TSF had been replaced with Adamantium, Ceramite, and several other materials Michael couldn't pronounce. He was also fairly sure none of them existed.

The main engine had been replaced with something called a Plasma Reactor, with a listed baseline output of several dozen times the maximum theoretically possible yield of the Black Widow's engine and auxiliaries, while still being somewhat smaller.

The muscle bundles and servomotors were both listed as capable of insane outputs, far more than capable of keeping up with the larger chassis and denser armor. If he was reading the report right, it appeared that the drive and jump units were both fully air-independent, and the unit itself was capable of working in space. Michael did a few quick calculations in his head. If they were right, Melissa's machine could reach high orbit without breaking a sweat.

And then there was the cloaking system. It existed.

With some trepidation, Michael opened the weapons files.

The basic Assault Cannon had been replaced with something called a Galvanic Cascade. The main body of the weapon appeared to be some form of quick-cycling hypervelocity electromagnetic impeller capable of firing a variety of metallic projectiles. The underslung cannon was listed as a plasma impeller, which appeared to use plasma as a working fluid to accelerate a heavy shell.

The Melee Halberd was labeled as a Charon Disruption Blade, described as using an energy field to strengthen the material of the blade while weakening and damaging the material of its target.

Secondary and point defense weapons were eight independently mounted salvo lasers arrays, with predictive cognitive tracking for engaging incoming projectiles, though they could be fired in override mode to shred exposed soft targets at close range.

Just as he finished reading it, Michael remembered that TSFs didn't have point defense capabilities.

Then he saw it. The Void Shield.

It was listed as a 'Tetralayer Interlocking Omnidirectional Asymmetric Immaterium Barrier'. Apparently, it projected a field above the skin of his machine capable of blocking immense amounts of weapons fire, without impeding his own offensive or sensor capabilities. It could be overwhelmed and collapsed by concentrated fire, but the generators were able to rapidly recharge and restore a lost field.

It was practically the perfect countermeasure to the Laser-Class BETA. If they'd had these Void Shields sooner...

At that moment, Michael's system scan finished with a ping. He was about to open the file when another friendly IFF signal appeared on his tactical display. He turned towards it, and saw... Something.

It was a Tactical Surface Fighter, probably a Shiranui Second bulked up similarly to his and Melissa's machines, though its skirt armor had been somewhat expanded.

Its skin was a bright blueish silver, which appeared to be glowing slightly. However, the most noticeable thing about it was the way it was moving.

In short, it was springing around like a drunk spastic jumping champion.

The machine tried to take a step forward, but it sprang into the air, traveling more than a dozen yards and landing somewhere ahead and somewhat to the right of its previous position.

Barely catching itself on its other foot, the machine tried to push itself back up to a standing position. It launched itself fully sideways this time, arms pinwheeling and jump units flaring as it tried to stay upright.

Michael found the whole thing more than slightly amusing, and was about to comment on that fact when a comms window appeared on his display, showing a panicked Miharu Kuroda with eyes wide and glasses askew.

"My controls are acting up!" She said, glancing around the cockpit, then rocking upwards as her machine landed particularly hard. "Help!"

Michael ignited his jump units, springing forward in a low arc. He cycled his engine up as he landed and began to skim across the landscape, barely touching it as he covered the distance to Miharu's machine in a matter of seconds.

Slowing his approach slightly to time his arrival to just before Miharu landed, Michael stowed his rifles on his knee locks and spread his hands, setting his feet and assuming a slightly crouched stance.

As she touched down, Michael sprang forward, wrapping his arms around the chest of Miharu's machine and lifted it off the ground. Letting her momentum carry her forward, Michael flipped her machine over and set it down on its back, mostly gently.

"Miharu!" He shouted, using a Command Override to open her unit status readout and biometric data. "I've got you. Stop moving while I try to figure out what's wrong with your suit."

Melissa landed next to them as Michael looked through Miharu's readouts. After a moment, he found something.

"Miharu, you're safe now. But I need you to tell me what Energy Joints are," He said, trying to make his voice as calming as possible, "And why you have yours redlined."

"I don't know." Miharu said, straightening her glasses and brushing a few strands of navy blue hair out of her face, then looking down. "I'm sorry, sir."

"That's okay." Michael said, looking through the readout details. "It looks like it's some sort movement boosting system. You have it running uncalibrated at the highest setting. Maybe that's your problem."

"Oh..." Miharu said. "I'll fix that. I'm sorry to be trouble, sir."

"I just glad that you're alive." Michael said. "I don't know-"

He was cut off by a sudden sparking sound filling the communications channel. He raised an eyebrow as Miharu began spasming almost comically in her seat. Just as he remembered the potential dangers of electrocution, Miharu went slack, shoulders heaving.

"I think the Energy Joints are Calibrated, sir." Miharu said, glancing at her readouts. "Permission to stand, Captain?"

"Certainly." Michael said, standing up and stepping away from Miharu's machine.

Normally, it took a TSF several seconds to fully stand up from a lying position. It could be accelerated somewhat under combat conditions, but it still took long enough that falling in close combat with the BETA was effectively a death sentence. Outside combat, standing usually took at least twelve seconds for a skilled pilot.

Miharu did it in less than two.

Her TSF moved with an alien fluidity, flowing like quicksilver as it rose to its feet, settling in a solid combat stance for a second, then relaxing.

"Impressive." Michael said, looking over Miharu's machine as he reviewed her technical readouts. "What about your swords? Have you checked those out yet?"

Miharu reached over her shoulder as her Mount Pylon raised one of her twin blades into position. Gripping the hilt of the blade, she held it in front of her and activated it.

Ripples in the air seemed to flow down the length of the weapon, accelerating until they were almost too fast to see.

Then energy like flames of deep indigo blazed down the blade from hilt to tip, small pieces rising away from the blunt edge and furiously burning themselves out of existence.

Then the energy was calm, simply running down the weapon in a neat, laminar flow. Hesitantly, Miharu lifted the weapon and took two practice swings at the air.

"Neat." Michael said. "According to the specs, those things are supposed to be devastating in close combat. Both of them are under the same system as the energy joints, along with some field generators to make them work, but the whole thing don't have a name listed. What do you want to call them?"

"I don't know..." Miharu said, eyes widening. "I mean, I've never named anything before..."

"Huh." Michael said. "What about Kusanagi? That's a legendary Japanese sword that's pretty significant, right? And I think it sounds pretty good, in any case."

"Kusanagi..." Miharu said, then closed her eyes for a moment.

"I like it!" She said abruptly, looking up, eyes bright. "Thank you!"

"I don't want to break up your moment," Melissa interjected, a strange edge on her voice, "But we have an inbound target approaching fast."

Michael looked down at his tactical display just in time to see a rapidly approaching contact be identified as friendly. "That's just Lily."

He opened a com line to her.

"Lieutenant Knight!" He said. "What are you doing?"

Her face appeared in a window on his display. Her eyes were wide and her pupils were dilated, and she was staring straight ahead with a strange intensity.

"My God, Captain. It's full of stars!" She said, slurring her words slightly. "I can see _everything_."

Michael sighed. "What are you talking about, Knight?"

She shook her head. "It's this new sensor system. It's... Amazing. Feels a little weird to tap into it, though, like that time we were working with the Russians and I borrowed their vodka."

Michael pulled up Lily's biometrics. They appeared completely normal; there certainly weren't any measurable traces of alcohol in her system, or any other toxins, for that matter.

Lily's TSF came into sight as Michael was examining her readouts. Like all the others, it looked nothing like the machine that had been G-Bombed in Normandy.

In her particular case, the dominant color of her machine was a deep, vibrant green, with a significant amount of black as a trimming and secondary color. The most immediately noticeable thing about it was the rifle it was holding. It was a massive weapon, easily more than ten meters long, of solid construction that seemed more artistic than that of the average Assault Cannon. It was predominantly black, but had a series of bright green components, some of which may have been thermal vents of some kind, and a delicate red tracery.

"What were you doing, Lily?" Michael asked, looking at her image in the communications window as her TSF landed.

"I was patrolling the border of the camp and scouting the immediate vicinity, sir." She said. "I figured it would be best to figure out where we were. If this is Heaven, I can't find the Marines."

"Did you find anything of interest?" Michael asked.

"No sir." Lily said. "Though there are some craters over that way that look like someone blasted the ground out with some sort of laseron cannon. They was still smoking and everything."

"Are you holding the... Laseron cannon in question, Lieutenant?" Michael asked, narrowing his eyes.

"Noooooo..." Lily said. "That ain't me."

"By the way, bro." Melissa said. "I've been wondering what you wanted to do about those shells on the horizon."

"What are you talking about?"

"The artillery barrage over there." Melissa said. "Someone's been firing off a bunch of heavy guns down that way at least since I woke up. At least a hundred tubes, probably a lot more."

Michael closed his eyes. "When did you plan on telling me about this?"

"You mean you didn't know?" Melissa asked. "I figured that if I was able to spot them, then there was no way that you could have missed..."

She trailed off.

"I'm sorry." Melissa said, after a moment of silence. "I'm an idiot, so I just thought-"

"Its fine." Michael said. "Now isn't the time to worry about that. I'm going to try to wake the others."

Michael closed his comms lines and opened his Command Pharmaceutical Administration menu.

"Awaken all unconscious healthy members of Windrunner Squadron." Michael said, in the clear tone best for using a voice interface. "Administer a minimum dose of stimulant if no change occurs after thirty seconds, then attempt awakening again after one minute. Authorization code up up down down left right left right beta alpha."

"Acknowledged, Captain. Administering electroshock stimulus."

Almost immediately, a comms line to Natasha opened, and the sound of her screams filled Michael's cockpit.

"Not again!" Natasha screamed. "I don't want to have to go through all that again!"

"Lieutenant, what's wrong?"

"N... nothing, Captain." Natasha said.

"Look. We're in the middle of nowhere and there's a big battle going on, and we need to go investigate. I don't have time for-"

"Oh." Natasha let out a sigh of relief. "Good."

"What about this is good?" Michael muttered.

"I thought I was trapped in some sort of time loop where an inexperienced soldier is sent into battle and killed, only to wake up and repeat it endlessly."

Silence.

" _That_ is the first conclusion you jump to?" Michael said, eyebrow raised.

"Sorry." Natasha respond, climbing to her feet and looking around.

Michael wasn't even surprised anymore. Natasha's TSF was red, a somewhat deeper shade than bright Communist red, with bright green tinged with blue that called to mind the northern lights as a trimming. It was even more heavily build than the Su-37 Terminator normally was, though its thruster arrays and jump units appeared to have been upgraded to match the increased load. There was an extra Mount Pylon in the center of its back, which carried a Rifle Of Unusual Size, unlike any production model, prototype, or concept sketch Michael had ever seen.

"Well." Natasha said, glancing down at something. "Hello there."

She held her arm behind her head and the fifth Mounting Pylon rose into a vertical position, giving her easy access to the handle of the weapon. Natasha grabbed the large ROUS and held it in front of her. Resting the muzzle of the weapon in her other hand, she was quiet for a moment.

"Glorious People's Christmas has come early, Comrades!" She said, her voice giddy.

The she fired.

A twisting jet of shimmering green energy shot out of the barrel of the weapon and into the sky, accompanied by a crackling roar not unlike thunder.

"Shoot that tree!" Lily said. "I want to see what it does. I'm pretty sure that was a plasma blast, and you can tell that's awesome just from the name."

"I'm not-" Michael began.

"Yeah!" Melissa said. "Do it! Give in to the peer pressure."

Natasha grinned and level the weapon at a stand of trees.

There were several more thunderous cracks in quick succession, and six bolts of plasma turned the grove into a pile of embers faster than Michael could process the massive breach of military discipline.

"Stop." Michael said firmly. "Everybody stop shooting."

"Are the Ents attacking? Are we working with Sauron now?" Cynthia said dryly, her face appearing on Michael's display. "Because Kashgar was enough like Mordor for my tastes, and I have no desire to go back."

"No." Michael said slowly, making it as clear as possible how much frustration he was keeping out of his voice. "Some of my underlings were simply being difficult."

"I was led to believe that American commanders valued initiative in subordinate commanders." Natasha smugly.

"It is, when it is tempted by enough intelligence and foresight to _not_ reveal our presence to anyone within fifty miles."

"I concur with Captain Black." Cynthia said.

"By the way, how long were you standing there?" Michael asked, glancing at Cynthia's TSF.

"Long enough." Cynthia said. "You really need to keep these girls on a shorter leash."

Cynthia's machine was a deep sky blue, trimmed with luminous gold. Its shoulder blocks had expanded, and the back of its calves and feet seem to have grown slightly, beyond the bulking up common to all the other changed TSFs.

"I do need to keep them on a shorter leash." Michael muttered.

"Is that how you view us?" Sigrid said, her voice softer and infinitely stranger than usual. "I am scandalized to learn that our brilliant squadron leader views his subordinate pilots as his sexual playthings. Despite this gross breach of military law, it is clear that the only course of action is to submit myself to the desires of my commander in order to prevent harm to the war effort."

"Sigrid?" Michael asked, face tranquil as a mountain lake as he glanced down at the comms panel to confirm the channel was still private.

"Yes, master?"

"What." Michael said. "In the Ten Names of God. The Hell. Was. THAT!"

He practically yelled the last word.

"Are you displeased with something-"

"And cut that out!" Michael shouted. "I am your superior officer! Under no circumstances is this conduct acceptable! Storming Damnation, what is wrong with you? You've never been anything like this!"

"I-" She paused. "My apologies, sir."

"Accepted." Michael said. "It's been a trying day. What happened to your TSF, anyway?"

"What do you mean, sir?" She said, her voice back to its usual hard semi-monotone. "My TSF appears to be fully functional."

"All the TSFs appear to have undergone significant modification following our experience with Gravity Induced Molecular Dissociation." Michael said. "For example, Melissa's Widow can turn invisible."

"Excuse me, sir?" Sigrid asked.

"Just... Run a status diagnostic and look for controls that weren't there before we got nuked. Empirical evidence says that there should be something usual, other than the force fields."

"Are you aware of how ridiculous that sounds?" Sigrid muttered. "Nukes do not do that. It would literally be throwing _decillions_ of unbonded atoms, many of them in exotic ionization states, and expecting them to form a twenty-meter war machine with capabilities that modern science can barely conceive. It's..."

"What?" Michael said.

"Quintessence Flow Active Kinetic Gale Projection/Direction System." Sigrid said.

Michael frowned. "Which means...?"

"It appears to be a system for generating pseudometeorological effects replicating small-scale high-velocity air movement." Sigrid said.

"Excellent." Michael said. "What sort of applications are we looking at?"

"Aerial dominance, projectile interdiction, tactical mobility, and others."

"Wonderful." Michael said. "Where are you, by the way?"

"I'm on my way."

Sigrid's TSF crested a hill and stood atop it, looking down at Michael. Its dominant colors were midnight black, accented by glowing panels of brilliant red. Its head-mounted vertical stabilizer had grown slightly, and its shoulder blocks extended some distance out from the main body, tapering to long spikes. Similar spikes extended from the pectoral region in either direction and extended outward in front of the shoulder blocks, though they terminated somewhat earlier. The two pectoral spines formed the upper two arms of an inverted five-pointed star, though the other three arms were considerable smaller.

The lower legs, forearms, and jump units had grown considerably; the large hands were tipped with appropriately-sized hands with vaguely clawlike, fingers, the Jump Units were massive, almost intimidating affairs that seemed at least adequate for lifting the enlarged machine, and the large calves and feet seemed perfect for providing a solid stance for gunfighting and swordplay alike.

"What do you think?" Sigrid asked.

Sometime before they joined the military, Melissa had explained to Michael that girls often ask strange questions, with obvious, paradoxical, or outright hazardous answers. She had continued to explain that somethings the syntax of the question had little to do with what was actually being asked, which made no sense to Michael. The whole conversation had left him rather more confused than he had been beforehand, and when he asked some rather logical questions, Melissa called him an idiot and stormed away without clarifying anything.

Michael couldn't quite place the tone in her voice, which was something that he relied on fairly heavily in his _somewhat limited_ interaction with women. Thus had even less of an idea that usual what the question was actually about. That in of itself was odd; Sigrid was usually rather direct. Michael decided honesty was probably the best policy; even the ravenous, otherworldly, and incomprehensible alien monsters that struck fear into all of mankind and had to at least value truth. He supposed even the BETA might appreciate some candor.

"I think it looks awesome." Michael said. "I like the-"

"Holy crap." Lily said, entering the channel. "Is Sigrid supposed to be some kind of Satanic Stormtrooper?"

"This is hardly the time for this." Michael muttered, switching the whole squad to open comms. "We need investigate that artillery barrage."

"I concur with the Captain." Keter said.

"Hello Keter, how are you today?" Michael said. "Oh, I'm great for having just been nuked, sir. Introducing yourself at the beginning of conversations has gone out of fashion, and so has passing information up the chain of command."

"My apologies, Captain." Keter said. "I consider myself rebuked. I have several questions about our present situation and recent events."

"So do I." Michael said. "But I don't know anything either."

Keter's machine stood up from the crushed stand of trees it had been lying prone on and began to walk toward the group.

Its shape, though bulked up like all the others, seemed rather more lethally elegant than the F-15E could ever be. Its skin was a silvery gunmetal color, though much of its surface was covered in raised plates and devices of sanguine red.

"Anyway, someone's firing off heavy artillery like it's a Mexican wedding down that way, and we want in." Melissa said. "So, can you fly?"

"My unit appears fully operational." Keter said. "But it appears to have undergone severe modifications."

"Run a full system diagnostic on the way." Michael said. "Well discuss tactics on the way. Is everyone ready to roll?"

The seven other members of Windrunner Squadron responded in the affirmative. Michael shook his head. _The Crazy Train is leaving the station_.

"We need to make better time than we can flying NOE, but stay low." Michael instructed, as the jump units of his TSF unfolded and began to warm up. "Restrict transmission; laser comms only unless I say otherwise. Now, let's go."

Michael smiled as his TSF began to run forward, rapidly gaining speed as the engines and Jump Units rose toward flight output. They sounded different, but it was a good sound, one that spoke promises of power and grace. He couldn't feel the bouncing gait of the TSF as much as he usually could, and he could feel the body of his machine like it was part of him, an extra limb he had never noticed before. This, he could do. He was a warrior, and he was in his element.

Taking a particularly long stride and pushing off as he landed, Michael ignited his Jump Units and rose into the air on a pillar of plasma, engines burrowing beneath him. The rest of Windrunner Squadron lifted off behind him in pairs, and in the space of a few seconds, all eight soldiers were in the air.

Looking straight ahead, Michael led his squad forward into the majestic dawn.


	3. Olympus Knights 02: Winds Alight

**Leave a review. Remember, only YOU can prevent CHOMPing!**

[x]

It could be said that Field Marshal Alberich Vesperia was having a bad day. This would be true, in the same sense as the statements 'space is big', 'Tyranids are hungry' and 'a plasma gun can double as a hand warmer are true'. Technically all three are factually accurate, but each is actually less helpful than no information at all, as no information won't mislead you into thinking you can solve the problem.

In short, his problem was Tyranids. Namely, his problem was that Tyranids were on the same planet as he was, had devoured several billion people, and overrun a significant portion of the planet. He was personally overseeing the defense of the Eastern Pass, the sole major route between the Highlands, home of most of the surviving citizenry and productive capability of the planet, and the Costal March, home to an unimaginably vast horde of ravenous alien monstrosities.

The Guard had established the first line of defense at the twelve-mile-wide mouth of the pass, but unrelenting Tyranid swarm assaults had pushed humanity back towards the Highlands, and now Alberich was holding at the third and final defense line, the last chance to stop the monsters before they could break through the pass and doom the planet.

He had arrived three days previously, along with the entire Emepheria XIII Mechanized Corps, a quarter of a million highly trained and well equipped soldiers, to reinforce the final defensive line. The entire Corps was outfitted with APCs, IFVs, and transports and backed by hundreds of tanks and aircraft. They could cross a continent in a week and charge straight into the enemy flank, or break a hostile line and gut the foe's rear areas.

All of which was completely wasted here. It had taken Alberich about an hour to realize exactly how hopeless the situation was. The Tyranids would take Gelion II; the only question was how long it would take them.

But his orders were to hold, and every day he tied the Tyranids up here was another day that another world had to prepare before it fell under the shadow of the swarm.

"Sir!" One of the auspex technicians shouted. "Anomalous contacts approaching from the North-West, distance thirty kilometers."

"Speed and altitude." Alberich demanded, wondering how in the Emperor's name they had gotten so close without being detected.

"Twelve hundred meters at sixteen hundred and fifty kph, sir." The man responded curtly. "The return is intermittent, though it does not appear to be organic in nature. Do you wish to scramble interceptors?"

Alberich shook his head. "We can't spare them. Get the Magos on the line and ask him if this is his, and ready the anti-air batteries."

"Yes, sir."

The command center was silent for a moment as the staff watched the contacts draw closer. The command center was a technological masterpiece, an easily assembled nerve center capable providing a commander with vast amount of information and providing him with direct command channels to his troops. It was a massively effective force multiplier, though its usefulness in a static trench war was... Dubious.

Then one of the communications specialists looked up from his board.

"The Magos says he has no idea what the contacts are, Marshal." The man said. "Though he did insinuate that we may have... Smeared excrement on the screen and are mistaking it for a contact."

Alberich nearly growled at the statement. The Magos didn't seem to grasp the gravity of the situation; probably because he wasn't stuck in it. His jump skiff was the sole Warp-capable vessel remaining in the system, and he had the authority to come and go when and wherever he liked.

Of course, the Governor and his inner circle had thought they'd had an out as well, but the planetary defense grid had tragically mistaken their fleeing star yacht for a ballistic missile, and they'd eaten a capital-grade laser as they tried flee over the pole two days previously.

The status indicators of the AA batteries were a reassuring wreath of green across Alberich's display, unlike almost everything else. At least he had his Ack-Ack, but given the orbital imagery indicating the presence massive Harridan fliers being grown in the Tyranid rear, it was only matter of time until he lost much of it.

He had managed to organize things so that the local conscripts took the brunt of the casualties, preserving the mobile XIII Corps, but he wasn't sure what he was preserving them for. There had been a major fleet engagement during the Horus Heresy a few sectors over; maybe a stray macrocannon broadside would wander into the planet and smash the Tyranid front and leave enough of his forces intact for a counterattack.

He shook his head. If he was simply holding out for a miracle... Then he was fulfilling his purpose as a guardsmen. He would die standing.

After all, an Effigy had no purpose but to burn.

[x]

Michael felt a minor acceleration pressure as his machine decelerated, though it was far less than he should have. They had also realized quickly that no matter how their TSFs were oriented, the pilot always felt 'down' as into the seat. It certainly makes long-distance prone flying easier; no one likes hanging on the ceiling for hours.

But it hadn't been hours; or even half an hour. The squad was flying well above the speed of sound. Aerodynamically, it should have been insane, but Melissa had pointed out that they had forcefields and should just use them to provide a more aerodynamic profile, though her terminology had been less technical.

Now he was hovering above a battlefield not quite like any he had ever seen. He had seen plenty of footage of large TSF battles and fought in massive conflicts in the simulator, but always between Human Tactical Armor formations and the BETA.

The battlefield below him was split into two even halves. On one side, soldiers manned an intricate network of interlocking trenches. The earthworks zig-zaged with sharp right angles and connected by communication trenches, and the fronts of many sections were reinforced with what appeared to be prefabricated walls. There were weapons emplacements and mortar pits at regular intervals. Oddly, Michael noticed a complete lack of barbed wire, which he recalled being fairly common in WWI trenches.

Opposite them, separated by at least a thousand yard of torn ground, was a horde of travesties.

Understandably, Michael had considered the BETA somewhat scary. They were a swarm of giant monsters, some of which had irresistible laser weapons. But you could avoid the lasers if you exploited the limitations of their platforms countless soldiers hand made the ultimate sacrifice to discover, and every other species of BETA had to close to CQC to hurt you. And while their forms were alien and shocking, they were manageably bad.

And there were no tentacles.

This multitude of terrors was different. At a glance, Michael could make out more than a dozen wildly divergent body types, each with a vast range of differentiation and most with a large number of eyes, claws, mouths, and or tentacles.

This divergent horde had a trench system of its own, but this one was much more sinuous and had a much wider variety of trench sizes, through which abominations of all sizes crawled. The trenches seemed to be shallower on average than their human opposites, relying much more on walls and barricades of a strange chitinous-looking material. A large number of flying silhouettes circled in the distance, though Michael couldn't make out their scale.

As he watched, a huge number of creatures boiled up from a section of alien trench a few hundred yards long. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of creatures in the wave, most fairly small by the standards of their horde. They ran on two legs, but were hunched over enough that one could confuse them for quadrupeds. They looked like beefy, chitin-plated velociraptors.

Towards the rear of the swarm, larger creatures were scattered in groups of two and three. These looked like larger, taller versions of the small ones, but they stood fully upright, somewhat like an enlarged, humanoid version of the small ones, it one were to disregard the tail and extra set of arms.

In their four arms, they carried a variety of weapons. Some looked like large, bony guns, and others carried long, rough, pale swords crackling with strange energy, while still others had scything claws or writhing tentacles.

They ran quickly, but they had barely made any progress when the human troops went into action.

Emplaced and elevated heavy weapons opened fire. Some fired projectiles that darted across the no-man's-land on trails of white smoke as they poured out a steady stream of spent brass. Michael watched one creature be struck by three projectiles in quick succession.

Then it exploded, the beasts around it not giving any indication they had just been sprayed by the viscera of one of their fellows.

Other weapons fired beams of ruby light, the afterimages each beam left behind giving the appearance of a massive fan opening as the gunners swept the weapon across the advancing swarm.

Mortars began firing from the human trenches, explosions ripping holes in the the alien advance.

But the attackers were tough, often not stopping until struck several times. They shrugged off much of the shrapnel from the mortar blasts, and though the horde was leaving dozens of trampled corpses behind them each second, there were a lot of them.

Then the human infantry opened fire, pouring beams of crimson light onto the attackers. These beams seemed to bother the aliens even less than the shots from the heavy weapons, but the humans fired in quick, disciplined volleys, their waves of fire striking the monsters like a quick arpeggio.

But it wasn't enough. The leading edge of the horde continued its advance even as it was burned away. Though the swarm had left the vast majority of its members on the field, they had closed to within a hundred meters of the first human trench.

Then the flamethrowers came out.

Streams of liquid fire sprayed from dozens of locations on the human trench, each blooming into a hellish flower as it stuck the charging swarm.

The monsters charge headlong into the flames, vanished from sight for the few seconds the humans continued firing. As the flames began to settle down, Michael could begin to make out a carpet of charred corpses. The small monsters had been annihilated.

However, dozens of the large ones continued forward, wreathed in flame. Michael's eyes widened as they broke into a scattered charge. The humans quickly cut down the rest, but seeing those creature continue their advance without regard to the fire covering their skin...

"Where are we?" Miharu said softly.

"Not where." Natasha said dramatically. "But when?"

"No." Michael said immediately, shaking his head as he pushed the image of the blazing monsters from his mind. "Don't be stupid. This obviously isn't time travel."

"Why not?" Natasha said. "We clearly aren't in our own time."

"We're clearly in some kind of parallel world." Michael said, fully aware of how crazy he was sounding. "This is obviously not the past, _those_ things would have left some kind of fossil record, and it can't have been too long ago, because there is very clearly a human army, industrial-age at the very least, and right in front of us. But if this is the future, the weapons are all wrong. Where are the TSFs? The Hardiman suits? The caseless ammunition? Those would all be really handy here, but they don't have them. But they do have those laser weapons, and I've never even heard a casual proposal for how something like that could work. Wherever we are, it's not home."

"But the idea that we're in one of an Unlimited number of Alternative worlds ridiculous; there'd be too many Extra, and there's no evidence to suggest anything like that exists." Cynthia said.

"Why does it matter?" Keter said, voice like steel. "I see humans being attacked by alien bug monsters. I took an oath to defend humanity, and I indeed to follow it."

"I'm with Keter." Melissa said. "Those things are too much like the BETA for me to do nothing."

"Observation suggests that either the unknown species is either a hive entity or places minimal value on the lives of its members." Sigrid said. "Allowing either to defeat a human force in unacceptable."

"This shouldn't be a democracy." Michael said. "But given the circumstances, I won't make this an order. If any of you object to intervening here, you may leave. I suspect this is a decision that will impact, or perhaps define, the rest of our lives, however long they might be. While I cannot say for certain that I know the best option, I know the path I will chose."

"I could never run away here." Miharu said, resolve tinging her soft voice. "Never."

"A Knight must stand as a shield before the weak, and be the sword that strikes down those who would do harm." Cynthia said firmly. "I shall protect those who cannot protect themselves."

"My people lost too much to the BETA. I don't care where we are; that cannot happen again." Natasha announced. "To that end, I shall stand where others fall."

Lily smiled. "You know me." She said with a shrug. "Did any of you really think I'd pass up a brawl like this?"

She hefted her massive sniper rifle. "Besides, I want to see this blighter in action."

"Then I will stand with you." Michael said.

[x]

"Marshal, we've got a visual feed of the contacts." A technician said.

"Display on main screen." Alberich commanded.

The massive display came to life. There was a short intake of breath from the whole command staff.

"By the Emperor." Someone muttered. "Those are Titans."

"But they're flying..." Another soldier responded.

Eight humanoid war machines hovered in the air in a lose arrowhead formation, weapons in hand. The air shimmered around them as their Void Shields refracted the ambient light around them slightly, and the trimming on several of them appeared to be glowing slightly.

Alberich frowned. He had seen Battle Titans during the Second War for Armageddon, and these were completely wrong. They were far too humanoid and well-proportioned, and they carried their weapons in what looked like articulated hands.

Plus they were flying. Not even Eldar titans could pull that one off.

Something seemed to separate from one of the lead 'Titans', flying toward the screen in a low arc, tailing a stream of white smoke. Alberich's frowned deepened for a moment, then he relaxed as the object separated into three red flares and deployed parachutes.

 _Three red_. Alberich though, thinking back to his days studying such things. The flare signal code was ancient, but rarely used. It could only convey pre-set signals, and sending vox transmissions or bouncing a tight beam off an orbital really was usually vastly more convenient.

As the 'Titans' began to fall sideways into controlled dives, he remembered what three reds signaled.

Commencing attack.

[x]

"Here's the plan." Michael said, as Windrunner Squadron dived in formation toward the alien horde. "It's unorthodox, so listen up."

"Sigrid, you're on Combat Air Patrol and Overwatch. Keep their fliers off our backs and provide fire support where needed. You're alone up there, so be careful. Look out for anti-air."

"Understood." Sigrid said.

"Melissa and Lily; you two are on search and destroy duty. Split up and leverage your advantages to eliminate High Value Targets. Commanders if you can ID them; Big Scary Monsters if you can't."

"Roger that." Melissa replied.

"Aye aye, Captain." Lily said.

"Natasha, Cynthia, Miharu, Keter, you three are linebreakers. I've highlighted what looks like their center of mass; I want it a bloody ruin." Michael said. "Natasha, you're in the center. Focus on breaking their ability to fight. Cynthia will back you up and exterminate. Miharu; left flank. Don't get overwhelmed. Keter; right flank."

"Yes sir!" The quartet responded.

"I'll be staying mobile. I'll try to keep everyone coordinated, engage targets of opportunity, and lay down supporting fire, that sort of thing." Michael said. "Everyone, do your job. Good hunting."

He paused for a moment.

"Engage!" He shouted.

The formation dissolved, and the eight war machines accelerated toward the enemy. On a hillside some distance from the alien front, a herd of beasts snapped into alertness. They were large, domed-backed quadrupeds with tiny heads and a massive organic gun assembly growing out of their backs. Moving in strange synchronization, the barrels of the weapons began to rise into the air, tracking Windrunner Squadron.

Michael listened to his Plasma Reactor humm behind him as he flew. He wasn't entirely sure what it _was_ exactly, but it made a beautiful sound. His readouts across the board were green.

Then a shimmering bolt of twisting, sickly green plasma the exact color of cartoon poison shot past him, just barely missing.

Several more followed, blasts of death filling the air around him.

Then one struck dead on.

And promptly splashed off his Void Shield like a squirt gun hitting a castle wall. The energy field shimmered as the plasma blast dissipated, and Michael felt a strange sensation at the impact.

Raising his weapons, Michael focused his display on his attackers, revealing a herd of nine hideous gunbeasts belching energy blasts at him.

"My turn." Michael said.

It was marvelous how calm he was. He shouldn't have been this relaxed going into battle, but he simply _was_.

Both of his Galvanic Cascades opened fire. Each weapon stitched a pulsing silvery line in the air as it fired.

The streams intersected the upper bodies of two of the gunbeasts, right around where their cannons connected to their bodies. Michael didn't know anything about their anatomy, so he went for a center of body mass shot.

Both of them exploded in a cloud of orange flame and sickly green as their bioplasma generators ruptured. Before the smoke cleared, one creature had fallen and another had been immolated.

The survivors returned fire, but Michael struck them down in short order with mechanical precision. His CQC skills were... questionable, but the number of pilots Michael knew or could reasonably believe were better than him with a gun was... Small.

Michael landed on the ruined ground, stepping down from the sky like a conquering hero of old. He was barely even conscious of his mount pylons unfolding and emptying an alien trench behind him.

The storm had come.

[x]

Natasha's rifles kicked in her hands as she fired a quartet of airburst canister rounds into the alien trench. The showers of hypersonic projectiles reaped a terrible harvest of the monsters, but it was only a bucket out of a sea of horrors.

Stowing her rifles on her thigh locks as her chest retrothrusters fired, reducing her forward velocity to a level that was merely reckless. Her Mount Pylons firing another pair of canister rounds into the remaining inhabited section of the trench behind her, Natasha reached back and grabbed her primary weapon, swinging it around to port arms before locking her offhand into position on the foregrip. Her machine could hold it just fine in one hand, but using two made it much more stable, and allowed her to connect additional power busses, raising safe and peak output.

All around her, the enemy raised a variety of weapons and opened fire. More than a hundred streams of projectiles of all descriptions impacted her shields, creating a strange haze around her as the field's counteraction on the weapons shattered and pulverized them.

Natasha stood there for a moment as the waves of fire rolled over her. Her shields were holding steady; very few of the monsters had weapons powerful enough to pose a significant threat. She had made sure of that by shooting all those that looked like they might have been before she landed.

The slight sense of pressure _over_ her skin as the weapons impacted her Void Shields was almost intoxicating. Combined, the barrage was about as effective as throwing pillows at a tank.

A predatory grin split Natasha's face as she raised the power output and widened the diffusion spread on her weapon, the Aurora Accelerator.

The Aurora Accelerator was a variable output high-energy plasma weapon. It was capable of various rates of fire, charging more energy into a single blast or spreading out the pain.

Something flickered across Natasha's face as the cloud of vaporized projectiles around her became completely opaque. If they'd had weapons like this... Then the Motherland would never have fallen. With Shield and Plasma, how many of the billions killed by the BETA could she have saved?

A soft blue-green glow began to emanate from Natasha's weapon.

"Comrade Stalin said that quantity had its own quality." Natasha muttered. "But in Soviet Russia, Quality Quantity YOU!"

She opened fire.

Sweeping repeating dispersed fire across a wide arc in front of her, Natasha gave the hellfire barrage a second to work, then charged forward.

Scorched carapace and bone crackled under her feet as she left the cloud, Aurora Accelerator aglow. The monsters opened fire again. They had brought forward some heavy weapons, but their attack was only marginally more effective.

Then a chitin barricade exploded outwards, and more than a dozen massive beasts rushed towards her. They dwarfed the surrounding creatures, each armed with either two pairs of scythelike claws or two massive bludgeons and two conical spears. They charged Natasha at a dead run, the smaller creatures scattering around them.

The fact that they came about up to her knee took some of the impact out of it.

Just after Natasha took off into a low boosted jump, a warning appeared on her screen informing her that the charging creatures were below her Void Shield's interdiction threshold.

Frowning, Natasha activated her CWIS arrays. Switching her 'subdermal' interceptor volley guns to ground fire, Natasha activated her flamethrowers.

Built into the waist of her machine on either side, the flamethrowers provided a useful deterrent to enemy forces that got too close.

Bathing the charging monsters in fire as she passed overhead, Natasha's volley guns laid down a barrage of coherent light.

She landed, surveying her work through her rear cameras. It hadn't been as effective as she'd hoped. None of the large creatures were dead, and most appeared to be only slightly irritated by the attack.

However, much like a Destroyer-Class BETA, they appeared to have difficulty slowing down or turning quickly at full tilt. More than a few of their smaller brethren learned this the hard way, the knowledge pounded into their brains by the same armored hooves that crushed their skulls.

Natasha activated her rear rifles, Mount Pylons unfolding to target the enemy monsters. Using her point defense lasers to keep the rabble off her, she began launching plasma bolts at the monsters in front of her.

As the last of the larger monsters fell to an Armor-Piercing High Explosive shell from one of her cannons, Natasha took off in another boosted jump, somewhat disappointed she hadn't had a chance to use her Blade Motors yet.

[x]

Keter leveled her right-hand rifle and fired an APHE shell from her Plasma Impeller. In an instant, the round blasted out of the barrel in short-lived cloud of radiant blue, fins popping out of the shell to stabilize it as it darted through the air toward a writhing, bloated alien monstrosity. The augmented diamantine tip of the round punched through the skull of the monster. The shell continued into the body of the monster. As its kinetic energy neared depletion, it exploded.

The monster seemed to jump in surprise as the APHE round gutted it, then it fell as its highly redundant and reinforced organ systems failed _en masse_.

Kicking a ten-foot alien to the side as she strafed away from the return fire, face completely neutral, Keter fired her two Pylon-mounted Galvanic Cascades at the swarm of small creatures charging her. As she launched another APHE round from her Plasma Impeller, she swung her left arm in a long arc.

Five mechanical tendrils shot out from concealed housings on her forearm, their tips shimmering with baleful energy. They spread out as she swung them, moving on their own to intersect with as many of the smaller creatures as possible. When they did, the results were not pleasant.

Jumping forward, Keter crushed another alien on landing. Ae her Mount Pylons redeployed their rifles, she swung her arm back through its previous swing, clearing the area around her.

Her Point Defense lasers began tracking as a swarm of small, relatively speaking, winged creatures took off from somewhere off to her left and began flying toward her. As the storm of beams from her PD arrays began dropping the creatures, Keter fired a pair of airburst canister rounds from her pylon rifles. Then she was already on the move, not even stopping to watch her shots gib their target swarms.

Keter was racking up kills quickly, but she was starting to fall behind Natasha and Miharu. Miharu had been a close combat monster even without Energy Joints and Darkfire Blades, and Natasha was directing incredible firepower into reducing the aliens into ash by the herd.

While Keter felt an incredible degree of connection with her machine, compared to Natasha or Sigrid or Melissa, Keter seemed to lack capacity. She was not jealous, of course, but she was concerned that she would not be able to contribute adequately to the mission.

As she jumped forward, Keter could feel something on the edge of her awareness. She had no idea what it was, but-

 _It was a Deathstrike Plasma Warhead_. Keter's eyes widened slightly at the sudden recollection. A Deathstrike Plasma Warhead was the working component of a variable-range ballistic missile designed for heavy bombardment and hardened target annihilation.

Glancing at her tactical display and immediately knowing the pinpoint position of the crashed device, she realized how effective it would be if she could detonate it. The missile had been intercepted by a plasma strike, but it had jettisoned the warhead before the plasma could eat through its re-entry shell. Though the explosive device was perfectly intact, there was no way to remotely activate it. Even though it was near the center of a high-density swarm of aliens, it posed no danger to them.

 _If it is for the Omnissiah and Humanity, then I will change_. Keter frowned. She didn't hear anything as coherent as words, but her mind seemed to unconsciously piece the alien information into that sentence.

An actinic light of incredible intensity flashed from somewhere to the east, and then light filled Keter's forward displays. They dimmed automatically at the brightness exceeded safe levels. They returned to normal just as the shockwave reached her position, shaking her in her seat.

The overpressure seemed to have more effect on the smaller monsters around her, but not nearly as much as it would have had on human targets. The aliens closer to the warhead were less fortunate.

Everything within several hundred meters of the detonation point had been destroyed. There was an outer ring of burnt and charred alien corpses, surrounding a ring of carbonized statues, both forming roughly concentric circles around the inner circle of complete devastation.

The swarms surrounding Keter seemed to hesitate at the sudden disappearance of a large portion of their force.

Somewhat perplexed at the sudden turn of events, Keter went back to work.

[x]

The Swarmlord was not capable of frowning, nor was it capable of fear, or doubt, or defeat.

However, if it were to have the necessary facial structures and were to consider its mouth to be a mathematical function, that function might be considered concave down.

It was currently wearing a body much larger than its normal manifestation. A lucky shot from the weapon the humans called a 'Volcano Cannon' had vaporized the upper half of its previous incarnation, and he had tailored this one to prevent a repeat of that inconvenience.

Everything had been going to plan; it had been placing everything in position to breach the human battle line in about one hundred and sixty human standard hours, most of which was to ensure a crushing defeat that would preclude a human recovery.

However, the appearance of these new and identified Battle Titans had thrown all of its timetables into the reclamation pool. The forward elements were suffering severe attrition, and losses were particularly bad among the larger strains, the same ones that would be critical to breaking the human line. Now, with the sudden annihilation of tens of thousands of various combat organisms, the situation was threatening to begin to turn against the Great Devourer.

That would not be allowed to happen. The Swarmlord reached out through the Synaptic Network, extending its vast intellect to touch a much less impressive mind. However, the body hosting this lesser presences was... Impressive.

Miles away, hidden by the curvature of the planet and nets of biological camouflage skin, organic rockets ignited. The Swarmlord would be rather proud of that one, if it were capable of such things, and the columns of fire began to lift a massive bulk into the air and push it forward.

Then the wings began to beat.

[x]

"Marshal, we have a problem!" One of the auspex officers shouted. "Routing to main screen."

An image of the sky over the battlefield appeared, with a large black speck in its center. The image zoomed in on the speck, revealing it for what it truly was.

A Tyranid Harridan, larger than any Alberich had ever seen. It was a massive beast, like a chitin-plated dragon from the ageless stories, though it lacked legs of any sort. At least forty meters long, its underside was covered with the telltale writings of a massive swarm of Gargoyles, and more than thirty Harpies and Hive Crones surrounded it in a twisted parody of an honor guard.

"Ready the-"

Alberich was cut off by a massive pair of biocannons lowering from the belly of the creature, where they had been masked by the swarming Gargoyles.

Bioelectricity crackled along the cannons as they fired, launching a pair of acid-green bolts and frying a gaggle of Gargoyles too close at the moment of discharge.

"Sir! Anti-Air Battery Twelve has been wiped out!"

"Have the rest of them raise their Void Shields and prepare weapons." Alberich said, trying to at least _sound_ calm in the face of this unprecedented assault. "And have-"

He paused as a shadow wreathed in lightning shot upwards towards the approaching monster.

[x]

Sigrid dropped to the deck as the large flyer disintegrated around the silvery threads streaming from her Galvanic Cascades. She took no pride in the kill, nor did she feel anything else with regards to anything. Her emotional state, normally a placid lake, was pressed down into a surface as perfectly uniform as the surface of a Strategic Laser focus mirror. It was a fitting comparison in many ways; the slightest imperfection in a laser mirror would see the panel consumed by the energies it channeled, but a perfect Strategic Laser was capable of immense destruction.

And if the focus mirrors burned out after the first couple of shots? Well, it was easy enough to find a replacement. Once you had the ability to manufacture them, the raw materials were everywhere.

Spotting a trio of large, hunchbacked creatures carrying massive weapons crawling across the battlefield, Sigrid angled towards them as she shed altitude.

One of the creatures spotted her at the last moment and struggled to raise its weapon to target her. However, it was poorly placed for anti-air work and Sigrid was on top of it before it could accomplish anything.

Pulling herself upward at the last second, Sigrid planted the massive right foot of her machine on the peak of the creature's back, impacting with the downward velocity of her flight and the incredible mass of her TSF.

Thrusting upwards and slightly to the left before she came to a full stop, Sigrid flew toward the next creature in line.

This one managed to raise its weapon, which began to spew a stream of tiny projectiles at her.

Each one evaporated off her Void Shield, to minimal actual effect.

Sigrid smashed this creature with her left foot, pushing off from the ruined monster to target the final foe.

Almost as if it recognized the odds it faced, this alien attempted to turn and flee, but its bulk and long body made that a slow process, and it had turned perhaps ninety degrees from its original facing before Sigrid landed on it, planting both feet on its conveniently positioned back.

She allowed herself to slow slightly this time, coiling for a jump for a half-second, then springing into the air, feeling something crack beneath her feet as she did so.

Then her threat warning went off. Snapping open her tactical display, she spotted something that might have made the blood of a lesser weapon run cold.

A legless dragon of colossal size and of the same aesthetic as the rest of the enemy swarm and surrounded by a swarm of the small fliers was gliding over the battlefield, its massive wings beating out a slow rhythm as it moved forward faster than seemed possible. Lightning began to gather between the two massive cannons on underside, followed by the launch of a pair of colossal projectiles towards the distant human lines. Sigrid's Heads Up Display registered it as slightly more than fifty meters long, with a wingspan well over twice that.

Sigrid redlined her engines and took off towards it, eschewing subtlety.

She was noticed almost immediately. The swarm of escorts split in two, half of them vectoring towards her while the others began to bring their belly-mounted biocannons to target her.

Mount pylons unfolding as she painted the fire support group, Sigrid readied her battleaxes.

Unlike the weapons she had wielded before, these weapons were cast entirely from what appeared to be a single piece of glittering black material. They had a macabre elegance to them, and they sliced through most of the alien creatures without significant difficulty.

Galvanic Cascades spitting death towards the far enemy, Sigrid engaged the interceptors. They spat jets of something as they closed, moving too slowly for her Void Shields to interdict.

In a fraction of an instant, Sigrid activated the signature system of her machine.

For a moment, she felt she was a single point in an infinitely vast ocean, a grain of sand in an endless storm.

Then her perceptions returned to normal, and she commanded the wind.

The air between her and the approaching creatures seemed to darken.

 _Photon interaction with the Quintessence forced to interact with the material universe_. Sigrid frowned imperceptibly as the ghost of the long-dead portion of her mind that had enjoyed her science lessons whispered the explanation to her.

Then the torrents of bile were cast aside, dissolving into spray as the monsters that had launched them began to beat their wings furiously, fighting the sudden gale.

Then Sigrid was upon them.

She cleaved one foe apart with each of her axes in quick succession, barely feeling resistance as the creatures ended. She launched into a barrel roll to evade the swooping attack of another, then struck it with a casual backhand, shattering its skeleton and sending it plummeting to earth.

Another creature flew directly into her path. Sigrid felt a slight jolt as she impacted it, then kicked one of its broodmates and swatted another with the flat of her axe.

She was an eagle flying through a swarm of moths. They were less dense, almost less _real_ than she was, and they broke at her touch. That was simply the way of things.

Trading fire with the cannon-equipped fliers as she closed, Sigrid disassembled that swarm as well, losing a measurable but not concerning level of Void Shield energy in the firefight.

Winged creatures began dropping from the belly of the massive beast, flapping furiously as they began to move to intercept her.

"Fall." Sigrid muttered, her voice horrifyingly empty.

Another gale of quintessence, this one directed downward, filled the air. The small creatures dropping from the belly of the massive beast were utterly overpowered by the sudden downdraft, and they tumbled downward. Some would recover, but by the time they returned to the upper sky, this fight would be resolved.

The massive creature roared and flared its wings back, the leading edges of the wings pointed directly at Sigrid.

Tiny, flailing creatures launched from the ventral surface of the wings, blasting towards Sigrid on clouds of inky black smoke, sparking ominously.

Sigrid's jump units rotated forward, arresting her forward momentum even as she began to accelerate upwards. The strange biological missiles turned to follow.

Arcs of electricity began to crackle across the black armor of Sigrid's machines as the red highlights began to glow. The frequency and intensity of the arcs increased until, when the first missile had almost reached her, Sigrid fired.

Flashes of lighting on an apocalyptic scale filled the sky, arcing between the approaching missiles, through the massive flier, and down to the ground.

Sigrid's Jump Units flared, launching her upwards and backwards. Feeling a strange vertigo from the lack of acceleration, Sigrid carefully maneuvered her TSF through a massive backflip, leveling out and returning to upright when she was on the same level as the massive beast.

And flying straight towards it.

Accelerating as she closed, the massive enemy airbeast took far too long to realize Sigrid's intention. She moved ever so slightly down and to the right, raising her axes above her head.

She looked straight ahead, unflinching.

[x]

Michael watched in awe as Sigrid and the massive flyer closed. They crossed, their silhouettes merging, and then they passed, flying apart.

Then, with an almost unnatural slowness, the right wing of the flier came free.

Catching the wind and filling like a sail, the severed wing lost most of its momentum and began to flutter to earth. The rest of the creature was less fortunate.

It continued forward like a missile, plunging forward on textbook trajectory. It attempted to recover with its remaining wing, but it all it managed to do was put itself into a complex, three-dimensional tumbling rotation as it plummeted downward.

Then it impacted with a colossal sound, its corpse vanishing into the massive cloud of dust kicked up by the impact.

[x]

Alberich and his entire command staff watched the main display in disbelief. Someone made the sign of the Aquila.

[x]

Melissa grinned wildly as she shot over the battlefield like a cruise missile, hugging the terrain at an insanely low altitude with her cloaking system engaged.

She had spotted the enemy command. It had been shockingly easy; once she'd see the movements of a pair of large swarms and vaporized their leaders, she'd flown a few miles up with her cloak active to observe the entire enemy force. There were two fakes, of course, but those were stupidly obvious, and a point near the center of enemy mass that they were protecting with way more freaks than usual became clear. Then she had just hit the deck and approached under cloak.

Peaking a ridge, Melissa caught sight of the enemy commander.

It was massive, just as she had expected, standing only slightly shorter than her TSF. It had four arms, each of which held a massive saber of bone and crystal. It was surrounded by much smaller creatures, each of which was a quadruped and had large, shield-like shoulders, but were small enough that Melissa felt confidant she could just step on them.

Extending four of her Mount Pylons equipped with rifles, two over her shoulders and one on either side and leveling the rifle in her left hand, she drew a bead on the enemy queen-thing and fired. Her Plasma Impellers each spat a RPAPFSDS, or Rocket Propelled Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot.

Each round consisted of a diamantine tip and an adamantium shell enclosing a core of relatively soft but incredibly dense collapsed osmium. They left the barrel at an insane speed, and actually accelerated as their rocket motors burst to brief but incredibly bright life.

At the relatively short range, the projectiles impacted before Melissa had time to process that they had been fired. Five jets of blood fountained out of the back of the enemy leader and, with her cloak flickering and fading, Melissa was already charging.

Putting down a spray of Galvanic Cascade fire, some of which seemed to be mysteriously deflected in front of the massive creature, Melissa closed with the enemy leader, swapping her left-hand rifle for her second Charon Disruption Blade.

As she reached the massive creature, she could see the effects of her shots. There was a hole in the creature's upper torso, just below the neck, leaking a dark ichor, one in the thorax, one in the gut, and one just over its right leg. In addition, its top left arm hung limp with one more bend than the other arms.

The creature sprang into action as she charged. Melissa brought her left sword around in a high horizontal sweep, forcing the creature to parry with one of its right arms as the ruined upper left limb fouled the lower. Then Melissa launched her right sword forward in a lightning-quick piercing stab.

As the blade sunk into the chest of the creature, it countered, striking her shoulder and sending up a cloud of sparks. A hit indicator flickered across Melissa's vision; the hit had vastly depleted the Structural Integrity Fields in the section, but caused only minor physical damage.

Striking low as she withdrew her blade, Melissa began to fence with the enemy warlord. It was fast, and its extra arm gave it a major advantage, but it was wounded, and Melissa's machine stood taller and had more raw strength.

After a few eternally long seconds of swordplay, Melissa locked blades with the enemy, right arm straining as it held both of the creature's blades off to the side of her body. The situation was mirrored on the left, leaving the creature's center wide open.

"This is no Warhound, boy!" Melissa shouted, broadcasting on the external speakers. "No Warhound!"

With that, she delivered a swift power kick directly to one of the RPAPFSDS rounds on the creature's chest. As the creature recovered, Melissa pressed her advantage and severed the warlord's lower right arm with an upward vertical swipe.

The fight continued for a few more endless seconds, but with half of its arms missing and five holes in its chest, the enemy leader had lost a lot of strength, and it was showing.

Melissa swung her left blade and cut into the creature's leg, then recovered and parried even as she set up another stab to the creature's chest. Punching her right blade all the way through creature's chest where a human's heart would be, she pushed her blade upwards and kicked the creature again, sending it reeling.

Then, with a quick swipe of her right blade, Melissa took the creature's head.

[x]

Michael looked down at his seismic sensor as the monsters around him seemed to go into a frenzied panic.

Something was very wrong.


	4. Olympus Knights 03: He Lays His Vengence

**So, funny story, I've had this chapter done for a while now, but I** _ **forgot to post it**_ **! So it was just sitting on my hard drive for weeks, doing nothing. Funny how things work out.**

 **Anyway… Enjoy?**

[x]

Field Marshal Alberich watched the feed from the spotter plane as seven Tyranid Bio-Titans, six Hierodules and a Hierophant, crested a ridge and began to advance towards his line. As incredible as it seemed, the creatures were actually _oversized_ ; the Hierodules stood a bit more than thirteen meters at the shoulder, and the Hierophant wasn't much below thirty.

"Enemy superheavy units confirmed." A Tactical Officer announced. "Three Barbed Hierodules, three Scythed Hierodules, and one Hierophant, all outsized."

Alberich grimaced. "Issue the order to all units; prepare to attack!"

"...Sir?"

"Those things hit like a hammer." Alberich said, shaking his head. "Trying to hold the line is the worst thing we can do; those things will go through damn near any fixed defense like an icepick through plastiboard. The best strategy is to let the line collapse in front of them while burning away the supporting units, then envelope and annihilate them as they advance."

A grim smile crossed his face. "But since _that_ 's not exactly an option, the best play we have is to advance to meet them, they try for an encirclement as they push forward. It could be worse; the enemy line looks like it's imploding, and they seem to have lost a lot of coordination."

Alberich took a deep breath. He was ordering thousands of men to their deaths. Again. "All forces, forward."

[x]

Michael watched in dull awe as the enemy behemoths came into sight, barely aware of the unnaturally precise firestorm he was unleashing.

It wasn't simply their size that was scary; they were still tiny compared to a Fort-Class BETA. It was something else entirely. These creatures were much more _concentrated_ than the BETA ever were; they were much smaller, but they punch far above their weight and were stupidly numerous.

Now they had scaled that up to the size of a Destroyer-Class _and bigger_. Michael had seen the destructive effects of their biological weaponry carried by the small creatures. On this scale, their power would be incredible.

He opened a comms line to the entire Squadron and took a deep breath. "Alright people, they're played their ace in the hole." _I hope_. "Now, it's big, but we've dealt with bigger before. I think the best plan is to-"

"Leave it to me." Miharu said, voice cold as steel and sharp as a razor. "I'll eliminate them myself. I won't be useless again."

Then she dashed forward with her usual unnatural grace and sprang into a boosted jump, blasting toward the seven approaching Bio-Titans.

[x]

Engineseer Hydrargyrum Dresden dashed towards his Sicaran Rapid Engagement Tank as fast as his augmented legs and artificer armor could carry him. A few meters away from the vehicle, he jumped.

While it wasn't technically _his_ tank in the exact sense of the word, the regimental commander was an intelligent man who knew how to make healthy decisions, and there was never any trouble.

Sailing through the air on a perfectly calculated trajectory, he rotated his body precisely in midair so that, when he landed just in front of the top hatch of the tank, he wouldn't have to turn to jump into the fighting compartment of the vehicle.

Coiling his mechadendrites as he slid through the hatch, he began securing himself in the commander's seat as he sealed the hatch behind him with a servo-arm.

"Alright gentlemen." He said, as the powerful engine shifted to combat level. "It's time to go shoot stuff. I'd have been here sooner, but for some reason I'd decided that it would be a good idea to reload Multicore Battery 14B before we left. Now, you may have noticed that-"

"Sir?" The gunner, Private Titus, asked. "What happened to the _guns_?"

"Well," Dresden began, "You know our autocannon got trashed in that scrape the other day. So when I found this Hellfire Plasma Cannonade lying around, I decided to amp it up and put that on instead of requisitioning replacements."

"But sir, what about-"

"Don't worry, we've have power to spare ever since I upgrade the reactor back on Regium Prime. We won't have any loss of performance."

"Okay, but aren't plasma guns _dangerous_?" The driver, Sergeant Carpenter, said. "I mean, I'm not even sure how many crunchies I've seen get fried by those things."

Dresden rotated his optics. "We'll be _fine_. Turns out those things are way safer when you face the thermal vent _away_ from the user and make sure the coolant loop if full. Turns out that ionic fluid is great for that, but the way. But since I knew you meatbags would we whiney about it, I added some extra thermal plating around the weapon."

Titus frowned. "But I thought that-"

"Nope! This is all completely above the board." Dresden said, holding up his hand. "I pinky promise."

He lit the fusion torch built into the pinky for a second, then put it out.

"Anyway, what's our status?"

"The infantry platoon is almost done loading." Carpenter said. "We should be ready to roll any second now."

"Excellent." Dresden said, pressing a glowing red rune on his armrest. "Blow the barricades!"

As he spoke, dozens of precisely placed shaped explosives detonated across a couple dozen meters of carefully evacuated trenches.

The excavations caved in, earthworks flowing into trenches to make an approximation of level ground. Wall sections fell flat and formed bridges, and within thirty seconds, a passable path of advance for the armored company had been created.

"Hydra Company, attack!" Dresden ordered, his vehicle surging forward across the trenches and onto the battlefield.

[x]

"The forward element is advancing, Major."

Major Julius Lanate sat up straight in the command chair of His Imperial Majesty's Stormlord _Black Trident_ , surrounding by a panoramic set of displays. As the communications officer spoke, Julius confirmed the message as his tactical plot updated, then opened a vox link to the vehicle commanders of his unit.

"Archon Battalion, move out and assume arrowhead formation as soon as we're out of the gate." He ordered. "Keep your shields full forward and on your exposed flank, and double check your cogflamers. Good hunting."

The _Black Trident_ , along with the rest of the vehicles in the heavy armor battalion, was equipped with Flare Shields. Projecting an asymmetric directed electromagnetic field of suspended electrons, the shields took some of the energy out of an incoming attack and spread it out over a larger area, making it much less likely to penetrate the hull. It was like having an extra regenerative layer of spaced armor. While they couldn't be projected in all directions at once, the shields been the deciding factor in turning the decisive armor battle of the campaign from a bloody stalemate into a crushing Imperial victory.

The cogflamers were a new accessory, added in transit aboard the _Blazing Starlight_ when the learned they were facing Tyranids. The weapons had active and loyal machine spirits, helping them throw up a maximally effective curtain of flame against charging enemies. Julius had yet to have a chance to put them to the test, but his expectations were high.

The _Black Trident_ crossed over the leveled trenches and out onto the broken field, and Archon Battalion began to fan out into an arrowhead formation.

The first rank was an outsized platoon of seven Leman Russ MBTs, three vanilla, two Demolishers, and two Punishers.

Next came the _Black Trident_ , flanked on either side by a platoon of six more Russes, each consisting of three vanilla, one Vanquisher, one Executioner, and one of the rare Incinerators. Four more MBTs, two regular, one punisher, and one Laser Destroyer Array-equipped Annihilator, held each flank,

Behind them were a quartet of Crassus Armored Assault Transports, two on each side of the centerline, each loaded with a full platoon of infantry. Next to them were twelve Dracosan Armored Transports armed with a variety of weaponry.

All told, Archon Battalion, twenty-seven MBTs, transport for three hundred and sixty infantry, and one Superheavy Tank, was a formidable force, one of thirty-two such formations, each built around a Baneblade or variant, that took to the field.

"Gunner." Julius said. "I see a company-sized formation of Gaunts and Warriors off our two o'clock."

He paused for a moment. "I don't want to see a company-sized formation of Gaunts and Warriors off our two o'clock."

The turret turned toward the herd of enemies with a whir. The gunner's fingers played across the weapons controls like a maestro's, plotting out a firing path as the barrels reached full rotation. Then he opened fire.

Faint vibrations ran through the tank as the massive Vulcan Mega Bolter fired, generating enough recoil to lift an APC off the ground.

The hypervelocity shells, smaller but _far_ faster than standard for a Stormlord, soared through the air, stabilized by tiny fins as their rocket motors drove them towards their targets.

Their kinetic energy alone was enough to main a Gaunt; the internal detonation was usually gratuitous. The Warriors lasted only slightly longer before being reduced to bloody mist.

The Megabolter played across the enemy formation in a matter of seconds, leaving no survivors.

"Commanders, engage at your discretion, but remember to conserve ammo; there are a lot of these bastards out here." Julius said, cutting the vox link and relaxing slightly into his seat, eyes playing across his tactical displays.

"Dear Emperor." The gunner muttered. "What the-"

"Onscreen!" Julius ordered.

An image appeared onscreen of one of the mysterious Titans in midair, twin massive swords held pointed forward at its sides and its pair of guns extended forward on their mountings, spraying silver death at the Tyranid Bio-Titans.

The silvery blue war machine landed and took off in another leap without slowing, straight toward the enemy leviathans. Its guns folded back to their positions on its back and, as the Titan neared the Tyranid creatures, raised its swords over its head.

A Scythed Hierodule charged towards the Titan and reared up to intercept it, but the Titan's thrusters flared, changing its course to line it up with a surprised Barbed Hierodule, and brought its swords down in a vicious overhand chop.

Twin lines of blood sprayed out from either side of both impacts as both blades sunk entirely into the flesh of the monster, arcs of indigo crackling around each.

[x]

Michael watched as Miharu fought like a hurricane. The monsters never seemed to have fewer than six scything claws threatening her at once, but her twin blades kept all of them at bay.

And she was on the offensive.

Blood fountained from each of the cuts she made as if it were pressurized, which Michael suppose it might be. Moving a circulatory fluid through such a massive body with such radical height variations would require a lot of energy, and he was fairly sure a central system would have to have a fairly high working pressure.

However, the sprays of blood never lasted long, as the creatures demonstrated a phenomenal ability to rapidly close wounds and recover tissue damage.

But it wasn't fast enough.

The fight had been ongoing for less than a minute, but Michael was already astounded by Miharu's ability. The aliens made use of their biocannons whenever possible, but Miharu was always out of their firing arcs, inside the length of the barrels, or far enough away that her Void Shield interdicted the hits.

The large monster readied its weapons, lightning crackling down the length of the biocannons even as a smaller beast charged Miharu, four scythes held high.

Miharu held still for a moment, then sprang backwards and towards the charging creature, blade swinging in a long arc parallel to the ground.

The tip of the weapon dug into the neck of the charging creature, and Miharu moved like a liquid matador, deftly directing the Alien into the space she had just occupied.

Right as it got there, the really big one fired.

Twin green streaks lanced through space and struck the smaller monster in the flank in blasts of blood, acid and fire. As it screamed, Miharu brought her other blade up behind her head and thrust it forward, impaling the beast.

It seemed to spasm as the blade pierced it, then slumped to the ground as Miharu removed her weapon and spun to face the next monster charging her.

[x]

"Bew bew." Engineseer Dresden said, watching through his viewscreens as his Sicaran burned a Carnifex to the ground. "Bew bew bew."

Taping an indicator rune, he ordered the crew to engage a charging Warrior brood. Carpenter blasted each of the five Tyranids square in the chest with a Plasma bolt, dropping them.

A pair of Sicarans advanced on either side of Dresden's tank, their Anvilus Accelerator Autocannons firing short, quick bursts to shred mobs of approaching Tyranids. The Hellhounds on the outskirts of the formation spat long gouts of flame that engulfed the smaller attackers and trickled down into the burrows and trenches that filled the new battlefield, giving the enemy no place to which they could escape.

Dresden took a moment to look back at the massive Titan battling the six remaining gargantuan tyranids. He hadn't even known such a thing was possible, but he was fairly sure he was substantially aroused by the sight. It wasn't simply the scale or the raw power of the high technology on display; it was the pure elegance of the combination of the two that truly astounded him. He considered himself something of a designer, but this machine and the others like it showed him how little he truly knew.

He had been born of the Forge World of Azoth Dalet, though 'born' implies that he had at some time been in physical contact with his mother. This was not the case; he was simply one of a lot of ten thousand children decanted that day. They were all the result of gametes acquired from a variety of high-quality sources and paired at random. The resulting zygotes were grown for a month. At that point, they were old enough that they could be screened for genetic quality control; any that would be born crippled or neurodiverse were liquidated, any modifications the Genetors wanted to make were applied, and the rest were grown for another twenty-four months before decantation.

In that time, their minds were not idle. A form of Mind Impulse Unit was used to trickle knowledge into the developing minds as surely as they were fed by the nutrient pumps, and the Biologis were able to monitor how they responded and use this to determine the occupation where they would be Of Most Worth. Azoth Dalet had suffered massive losses in a series of Chaos incursion, and it needed to rebuild its population quickly to ameliorate the massive resulting production shortfalls.

A third became Menials, and a like number were sent for growth acceleration to become Skitarii infantry; these would likely not survive to the tenth anniversary of their conceptions. Many of the rest were assigned in smaller numbers to other, _slightly_ more desirable fates. One was found to be a suitable Princeps candidate and was shipped off to the Collegia Titanica consulate half a world away faster than a certain long dead bagel merchant would have thought possible. Another was found to be a Blank, and fetched a sum greater than most people alive could have imagined.

Their spirits buoyed by this infusion of pocket money, the lords of Azoth removed the quotas on the remaining children, numbering just below a thousand, who were destined to join the Priesthood of Mars.

The life that followed was not an easy one, but it was one in which Hydrargyrum Dresden excelled. He was the model Acolyte of the Mechanicum.

Until exactly halfway through the sixteenth year of his operational life.

On that day, he finally understood why the Priest of the Machine God abhorred and excised the passions of man.

On that day, he swore an oath that he would never do likewise.

On that day, a boy just barely on the cusp of manhood gained, in a single moment of transcendent clarity, a truer understanding of the present and future of the galaxy than all but a handful of individuals, few of them human.

On that day, amidst the death of millions, something was born. It was invisible, ethereal, and ephemeral, but it existed. It was a spark, impossible to say what it would ignite. But in a damned and dying world, any distant light was a blessing.

On that day, Hydrargyrum Dresden rejected the Thirteenth Commandment of the Mechanicus, at took the first step toward blazing a new trail, toward becoming an atavism of a forgotten epoch.

He spent the next decade working relentlessly to build a network of power before he took action, then two more gathering resources as he worked in the shadows towards his hidden goal. He kept his rank artificially low even as he expanded his power, so as to stay out of scrutiny and competition of high Mechanicus politics.

Then, five years ago, his fortunes had shifted. Several of the political factions he had attached himself suffered a sudden loss of power, and he found himself on the outs with... Pretty much everyone who mattered on Azoth, actually.

He had always been able to feel the changes of the wind, and he knew when he needed to leave. He stole everything he could get his hands on and reassigned himself to a random Imperial Guard formation that he noticed had a forgeship.

That was when he met Field Marshal Alberich Vesperia, and it was the promising beginning of a long and beautiful friendship.

The Emepheria XIII Mechanized Corps possessed the schema for the Sicaran Battle Tank, but just like everyone else with that knowledge, they had no way to use it. The Sicaran had been created from a combination of elements taken from the Rhino and Land Raider STCs. However it had many components in common with the Land Raider, making it even more hellishly difficult to construct, and the workarounds used by sanctioned Land Raider producers were unavailable to everyone else.

Dresden broke down the sanctioned design and found the components and systems that made Sicaran manufacture functionally impossible. Borrowing heavily from the Leman Russ design, he replaced what he could with comparable existing components, and replaced others with components of his own artifice. He'd had to completely redesign the engine-reactor complex, and he had combined the Anvilus pattern autocannon technology with the Accelerator Autocannon in the original, producing a weapon superior to both and vastly better suited to the realities of contemporary manufacture.

It had been an extensive redesign project, and the final product, renamed the Sicaran Rapid Engagement Tank, was really just a vehicle with a similar appearance to the Sicaran and with comparable or marginally better specs.

This was confirmation to Dresden that he was a genius, and Alberich put the new tank into immediate production. However, neither of them had yet found a way to distribute the design beyond the XIII Mechanized.

He'd spent the next couple years working out the Flare Shields to protect the Corps' heavy and Superheavy vehicles, but they'd run into the same export problem. As a result, he'd dedicated himself to smaller projects, like the Repeating Laser Assault Rifle, and larger ones, like the Jetnought.

But with these...

Dresden looked up just in time to see the Titan slice off the front halves of both of a Barbed Hierodule's biocannons, the jet backwards. The creature tried to fire them, but both exploded almost literally in its face. The creature didn't live to regret the mistake, as the titan darted in and severed its head, then stabbed it in the stump, blade penetrating almost to the hilt before being withdrawn in a shower of blood and fire.

Frowning, Dresden 'glanced' at his chronometer. His Flashback Suppressor must have malfunctioned, but thankfully he hadn't lost much time. Shaking his head, he resumed the command of his unit.

[x]

Cynthia Elswood grinned viciously as she commanded her fleet of drones in battle.

Her TSF's resonance drones had been replaced with a flock of thirty-five Autonomous Combat Platforms, much larger and _very_ heavily armed. Each slightly larger than two really big motorcycles parked next to each other, they were powered by some kind of direct causal like to her reactor, allowing them to be grossly overpowered for their size.

She had divided them into seven squads of five, so each unit had one of each drone type; a Blaster, a Gunner, a Bomber, a Sweeper, and a Slasher.

"Yes! YES!" She cackled, as one of her blasters reduced a large enemy monster carrying a bulging and squirming sack to ash with its heavy laser arrays. "Tremble before Cynthia Elswood as she commands her lifeless minions against the fleshy horrors from BEYOND SPACE!"

A Sweeper fired its Shard Projectors into a mob of small monsters, killing more than a dozen of them. They had no respite as a Slasher fell onto them, using its flame projectors to heard the creatures into the reach of its blade-tipped tendrils.

Keeping a horde of the larger creatures at bay with its Maxin Laser Blasters, a Gunner provided cover for a Bomber to pelt the squishier creatures behind them with its Charge Mortars. Cynthia gunned down a brood of approaching gunbeasts with her Galvanic Cascade, then fired an airburst round from her Plasma Impeller into a more distant mob of horrors.

Cynthia Elswood was doing all of these things and none of them. Her mind flittered through her neural interface, cycling between controlling her machine, commanding her drone platoon, and working on cracking the control encryption and modulation of the local human forces.

Then it clicked.

The air was suddenly filled with useful data, all of it in some incomprehensible dialect of...

English?

It was. As Cynthia poured herself into datastreams and decrypted recordings, she began to gain a feel for what the culture of the people they were defending was like.

In short, they were a fascist totalitarian xenophobic semi-theocratic imperialist police state.

After all, they could be a communist totalitarian overtolerent institutionally atheistic internationalist state with mind control enforcement. From her own personal historical analysis, that was probably the worst possible combination.

Moving forward, she began examining their infosystems. What she found was... interesting. There defenses were patchwork. Some areas were surrounded by flawless defenses stronger than she would have thought possible, while others could have been hacked by a spastic child with dial-up.

Diving into their less-secure databases, Cynthia began absorbing the history of this place.

It was rather unpleasant.

Assuming that there was even some truth to the records, every negative adjective applicable to this 'Imperium of Man' was not simply justified but _laudable_. The amount of absolute _bullshit_ that humanity had experienced in the past _ten thousand years_ was impossible to comprehend.

Shuddering slightly, she began to put together an intel dispatch for the rest of the squad.

[x]

Lily Knight drew a bead on one of the larger gunbeasts; Cynthia's data packet had labeled it as an Exocrine. It was closing on Miharu to blast her with the plasma cannon that made up much of its upper back.

Effortlessly calculating air resistance, ballistic drop, Coriolis force, and a dozen of the other little things that influenced a twenty mile sniper shot.

She pulled the trigger, and a single instant later, the Exocrine exploded.

Waiting for her weapon to cycle, she then blasted a Tyrannofex and a Tervigon in quick succession, showering the surrounding Gaunts in gore.

Lily's TSF lay prone, more than a mile above the battlefield in a nearly inaccessible patch of flattish rock high in the mountains surrounding the battlefield.

As she picked her next target, the Mount Pylons on her back rose into firing position. The Plasma Impellers began firing in quick succession, launching a hail of shells toward the distant horde of monsters.

Uriel was incredible. The rifle, and the sensor set, and the targeting system were all integrated into one unified system under that name, and it was amazing.

She was aware of everything around here, and when she focused her perception in one direction, it extended all the way to the horizon, and beyond.

The rifle was amazing as well. It assembled metallic particles into a shape prior to using a massive electromagnetic impulse to launch it at insane speeds. But changing between a solid projectile and a relativistic particle beam, she could use it to engage with either parabolic over-the-horizon fire, or strike anything within her sight nearly instantaneously with a particle blast.

Miharu was also amazing as she fought. It was like watching Athena, warrior and weaver, spin a web of steel and fire through her enemies as she fought, each step and each slice a perfect movement. She had already slain three of the smaller Bio-Titans, and each of the four survivors bore numerous wounds. Their carapaces were stained with ichor spilled from the gashes covering their bodies, and most were missing at least one limb.

Lily vaporized a few more of the larger creatures. She hoped that someone was appreciating her contributions.

[x]

Miharu ducked a pair of scythe slashes, then struck the foreleg of the Hierodule she was fighting with both of her blades in a scissor motion. She cut into the bone, then used her Jump Units to slide away.

With a resounding crack briefly audible over the din of the battle, something in the leg of the colossal Tyranid gave out, and it fell forward. The beast caught itself on its other foreleg, but Miharu's Mount Pylons were already unfolding as she landed. A moment later, a storm of silvery electrified hypervelocity projectiles engulfed the monster's intact leg, shattering scales and tearing tissue.

Then Miharu fired a pair of canister rounds from each of her guns. Rather than firing simple metal balls, each of the canister rounds contained over a thousand balls of a rather more creative construction. Each was composed of engineered tungsten alloyed with a synthetic diamond structure, giving it insane density and hardness.

Thus, when it hit something, it hit _hard_. Dozens of balls of shot struck the Tyranid's good leg, tearing the remaining flesh and sending it tumbling to the ground. The creature roared furiously as it impacted, half-pined arms waving ineffectually.

Miharu leapt forward, raising her right blade over her head. As she landed, she brought her sword down like a headsman, taking off the monster's head. She lined up her other blade and drove it through a damaged scale and between the creature's ribs for good measure.

As she slid away from her fourth superheavy kill, a pair of biocannon shots struck her Void Shield. The projectiles disintegrated, but their energy collapsed the final remaining layer of the shield.

Warnings flashed across Miharu's display, informing her that she was exposed to fire. The other three Void Shield systems were still venting energy and accumulating charge. Interrupting that process would do more harm than good.

Her Internal Field Bracing was also severely depleted, pushed to the limit by the thundering blows of the Bio-Titans. Her physical solid-state armor could still take a beating, but it would not recover the way Field Bracing would, and she had no idea if there would be anyone who could repair her armor.

By all honesty, she had done more than could ever be reasonably asked of her. These Bio-Titans were monsters unlike anything she had ever seen. The only things she could think of that might come even close to them were the Laser/Fort-Class BETA that had nearly derailed Operation Oaku and the Warship-Sized Carrier-Class BETA, a creature capable of carrying Battalions of smaller BETA and weathering battleship fire.

She had slain four of these monsters and wounded the rest, probably reducing their combat power by more than two-thirds. Seven of her comrades were on the field; by all logic, she had done more than enough. With the damage she had done to their legs, none of the Bio-Titans were going anywhere in a hurry. The best course of action would be for her to jump away and have Captain Michael or Lily shoot the monsters to death from a relatively safe distance. There was no good reason for her to remain on the field.

"Redline primary reactor." Miharu commanded, though the vocalization wasn't strictly necessary. "Main engine to standby. Auspex to minimum. Route maximum power to Field Bracing. Open Energy Joint safety interlocks. Energy Joints to maximum. Blade Field to Maximum."

The shimmering flames on her swords shivered as if in expectation as they reached design maximum output, and the skin of her machine seemed to shine like silver in the Mercurian sun.

Jump Units pulsing as she ran, Miharu charged the Hierodule that had dropped her Void Shields. Arcs of electricity began to spark across the weapons as the monster prepared to fire. Miharu could see clearly where they would impact, their flat trajectories obvious at such close range.

Raising both her blades to diagonal with the ground, points forward and edges angled slightly inward, Miharu watched as the Tyranid Bio-Titan fired its weapons and made a minute adjustment to the position of her blades.

The projectiles crossed the distance between them in the blink of an eye, then impacted with an immense thunderclap followed a sliver of an instant later by a massive clang.

Two brilliant orange fans of fire sprayed out on either side of Miharu as the biocannon rounds stuck her blades at oblique angles and bounced off, denatured and ignited by the Blade Fields.

Miharu closed the remaining distance in an instant. For a second, she thought she saw something vaguely reminiscent of surprise in the abomination's bearing, but then she was upon it, weapons flashing as she removed the monster's biocannons and scythes in quick succession.

Stepping back and planting her right foot, Miharu surged energy to her left leg as she raised it and kicked the monster under the jaw, knocking its upper body several meters upward.

As she recovered her leg, Miharu flowed forward and kicked the creature again, harder, with her right leg.

The creature rose into the air, exposing its belly. Miharu flick both of her swords in a quick upward slice; the thinner belly armor of the monster, more like kevlar and leather than solid chitin plates, was intended to ward off the weapons of infantrymen stupid enough to find their way directly beneath the beast.

Her blades were a league apart from that.

Gravity acted slowly on the scale of Titan combat, and Miharu had time to make a second pair of downward slices on the Tyranid's belly, outside of the first, leaving large sections of hide attached to the creature solely by the viscera they were meant to protect.

The Bio-Titan fell, soaking the ground in ichor as it spilled its guts. Miharu slid to the side, placing its corpse between herself and her two remaining opponents as her Mount Pylons unfurled, the mounted rifles fully loaded with high-density Cascade rounds and Armor-Piercing High Explosive shells for her Impeller.

She had saved the best for last; the sole remaining Hierodule was cover in cracked or shattered chitin plates and had lost one of its pairs of scythes.

Miharu unleashed hell. For all her passable skill in close combat, she wasn't half the shot that Captain Michael was. But she was at close range, had a target literally the size of a barn with less armor intact than not.

Letting her Galvanic Cascades play over the beast for a moment, each round emitting a tiny flash as it impacted. When the weapon fired, each round absorbed some portion of the energy that might otherwise be lost as heat and stored it for the scat moments until it impacted. Then it discharged that energy, amplifying its destructive effects in a burst of actinic light.

As the barrage cracked chitin and tore flesh, Miharu opened fire with her Plasma Impellers. Some shells missed their target or struck intact carapace, but most plunged into flesh. Before the creature could be burned by the superheated surface of the shells, they detonated, blasting bizarre fountains of ichor from their entry wounds.

Folding her Mount Pylons back into position for Sub-Arm reloading, Miharu pulsed her jump units to rise a small distance above the ground on a predictable trajectory. As the Tyranid raised its remaining scythes to intercept her, her Jump Units pivoted and fired, pushing her to the side.

Landing next to the tail section of the creature, Miharu severed the appendage with a trio of cleaving attacks to a section of destroyed carapace, then jumped behind the creature as it turned to bring its weapons to bear.

Swinging her right-hand sword in a long downward diagonal slash, Miharu struck the knee of the monster's least wounded leg, then delivered a quick kick to its calf that moved the angle of the lower leg outside the region intended by its designers.

The Tyranid roared in fury. The sound rose two octaves and took on a completely different feel when Miharu drove one of her blades all the way up to hilt into the tail stump.

As the abomination died, a second, far more powerful death scream echoed over the battlefield. Miharu turned to see the largest creature, the Hierophant, collapse to the ground, its legs shot to uselessness, massive burns where its biocannons had been, and each of its major sensory organs in ruin.

Captain Michael, the majesty of his machine somehow untouched by the scrapes and splatters of ichor that covered its surface, strode across the battlefield, both barrels of all four of his rifles trailed wisps of smoke.

A comms window appeared in the corner of Miharu's display, showing Miharu's squadleader, an impish grin on his face.

Miharu's eyes widened. "Captain Black-Senpai! I-"

"Enemy superheavy targets eliminated." He said. "Superlative work, Lieutenant Kuroda. The enemy is losing ground and taking heavy losses across the front, and their left flank is on the verge of collapse. We're going to go turn that into a rout, then meet our new friends.

[x]

Field Marshal Alberich Vesperia watched his holographic tactical map, the corners of his mouth twitching upward as the marker representing Archon Company reached its forward objective, several assault battalions in an arrowhead behind it.

The turning point was the death of the Bio-Titans. Their death screams had sown discord and panic in the xenos swarm, seeds his experienced tank commanders were quick to cultivate.

Then the mysterious Titans had formed up and swept the flank of the alien horde, gunning down just about everything larger than a Maleceptor. With most of the serious threats to the tanks gone, the entire flank turned into a killing field.

Resisting the urge to chuckle as he thought of the hilariously pathetic Tyranid psychic 'sniper', Alberich watched as the icons representing saviors of his force completed one last pass over the main Tyranid force, then turned and set a vector for his headquarters.

To be honest, he would be lying if he said that he wasn't at least idly considering the possibility that the Titans were a squad of Seraphim, Angels of the highest order, sent from the Emperor's side to assist him. Improbable as it was, no other explanation made even a modicum of sense.

Alberich shook his head, then turned to his steward.

"Start making preparations." He said. "It's about time we go meet our guests."


	5. Olympus Knights 04: Diplomancy

"-So be on your best behavior." Michael said, soaking in the feeds on his wide-area displays as Windrunner Squadron cruised towards the Imperial Headquarters in an arrowhead formation at considerably less than maximum velocity. "You all read the packet Cynthia put together, so everyone should have a good idea of how to talk so as to avoid starting a fight."

He sighed. "That being said, I'm not holding my breath, though I don't have an exfiltration plan yet. Be careful, be polite. Trust but verify. Try to let me and Cynthia do the talking. Melissa, that means you."

Michael spotted a massive, wide open square not far from the prefabricated command bunkers. MPs maintained a cordon around the square; it appeared to have been cleared just for them.

As one, Windrunner Squadron alighted in the center of the prepared square, Jump Units shutting down and engines shifting to standby. As Michael began preparing to exit his cockpit, he spotted a half-dozen figures moving through a gap in the cordon. Zooming his displays on them, he identified the likely leader, a pair of men who looking like advisors, and a trio of armored guards with heavy rifles.

Michael briefly considered exiting the cockpit in his Feedback Protector powered exoskeleton, but thought better of it. He would still be vastly outnumbered, and the ability to send his TSF on a rampage via a remote signal would be much greater protection. He did make sure both his pistols were in their thigh holsters, though.

As his seat moved forward, it occurred to Michael that he was buried much deeper in his machine than when he had crossed the Channel. That wasn't surprising; this new machine was vastly more resilient than a normal TSF, so it made sense to have the pilot in a more protected location.

The outer cockpit shield opened, and Michael blinked in the sudden direct sunlight. It was the first such light he had seen for more than twelve hours, as the squad had mounted up in England before dawn.

He had forgotten how irritatingly bright it was.

Michael grabbed the elevator cable and began lowering himself to the ground, doing his best not to look around like an idiot tourist. Now that he was out of his giant robot, the large number of people with guns in the area was a lot more impressive.

Pausing for a moment as he touched down, Michael wished he had so way to control his retinal projection systems outside of the cockpit. Then maybe he could look around without compromising his illusion of composure.

"Walk towards them." Cynthia said, speaking directly into his head via the suit comms. "But don't get within twelve feet. That's usually a sufficiently respectful distance."

As Michael began to walk forward, the Imperial delegation did likewise. He paused when they came within twelve feet, but resumed as they continued moving forward.

The probable leader stopped just in front of Michael and extended his right hand. Cautiously, Michael shook his hand.

"My sincere thanks, Princeps." He said, in a deep, strong voice that seemed to be the ideal for a commander. "Without the intervention of your Contubernium, we would likely have been overrun. I doubt this world could have survived long past that."

"I was my honor, Marshal." Michael said. "No one under my command lost their lives today. Those who did are the heroes here."

"Well spoken." The Marshal said. "But while we laud the heroic dead, we must take care to remember the value of life. After careful analysis, my staff has discovered that soldiers killed in combat operations have a shockingly low success rate on future missions."

He shook his head. "But enough of that. Today, at least, is a victory. The mouth of the pass is prime defensive terrain, and allows us to concentrate our forces over a much shorter front. If I may inquire, what are your plans for the near future?"

"Tell him that our orders were scrambled, and we are in the process of deciding." Cynthia said. "We want to make as few commitments as we can until we know what the hell is actually going on."

"Our orders were somewhat garbled in transmission." Michael said. "We know we were ordered to deploy here, but the rest was unsalvageable. I am still determining our future course of action."

"If you would consider remaining here to assist us, I would be very grateful." Alberich said. "This morning, I would have called our situation here untenable, but now..." He tilted his head. "We may be able to hold out for some time. Perhaps long enough for reinforcements to arrive."

"I would be honored." Michael said. "However, my unit and I would require lodging, as well as technical and logistic support. We were unable to bring the supplies necessary for a protracted campaign."

"Of course." The Marshal said. "I expected as much. Preparations are already underway. If you would like to have your squad move your Titans to a secured hanger my engineering staff has been preparing for the purpose, we could retire to somewhat more comfortable quarters."

"Of course." Michael said, recalling something he had discussed with Cynthia. "Naturally, I expect that hangar facility to be guarded and undisturbed until my people can return to supervise repairs."

The Marshal nodded. "I will make it so."

"Oh, and the Machine Spirit of my Titan can be rather... temperamental, and we've been trying to track down a persistent failure with the standby weapons lockouts. If I, or any of my pilots were to encounter some misfortune, I cannot be entirely certain what would happen."

[x]

Techpriest Enginseer Hydrargyrum Dresden sat at a simple holographic desk, the surface of the desk surface lit by the soft white light of its standby mode. The room around him was pitch black, and the only thing he could see beyond the small circle of light cast by his desk was a ring of monoliths, twelve in total, each about twice the height of a man. Each monolith was pitch black, yet somehow distinct against the blackness, and bore the Cog-and-Skull of the Adeptus Mechanicus and a number between 01 and 12 in glowing red lines.

"We have received your report, Enginseer Dresden, and find it somewhat implausible." 01, the monolith directly in front of him, said. "This business of airborne Titans seems incredibly far-fetched. If you wish to deceive this council, you would be wise to choose a lie that one could believe without lobotomy."

"To be honest, sir, I am insulted that you believe I would attempt such a thing." Dresden said. "However, having anticipated such a reaction, I have prepared several hundred thousand megabooks worth of confirming data. Combat necessities limit the Astropathic bandwidth available to transmit it at this time, but when the assembly of the Choir Booster Array I ordered upon arrival finishes in about six hours, I will be able to increase the rate of transition by a factor of about thirty. I will transmit all of the relevant information in triplicate, of course, to ensure-"

"Why did you construct an Astropathic Array?" 04 asked.

"Did you know that an Astropath's brain can explode if they receive a volume of information exceeding their Malcador limit integrated with respect to message time?" Dresden said, his tone of voice shifting radically. "It's fairly uncommon, but it happens."

Dresden frowned. "How many Astropaths do you have?"

"Silence." 01 said. "We will temporarily accept your claim on provided evidence. Now, which of the Legions has fielded these machines, and Forge World do they call home?"

"I am not certain." Dresden said, calling up the images of the Princeps who had conducted negotiations.

He was a tall young man, probably just old enough to be of legal majority on most Imperial worlds. He was several centimeters above the average male height for standard-gravity worlds, with jet black hair cut in a neat military fashion, and his green eyes surveyed his surroundings with a surprising level of curiosity. He was covered from neck to toe in a deep blue flight suit, which appeared to be a thick form-fitting membrane overlaid by articulated rigid plates.

Dresden turned his attention to the symbols on the Princeps' suit. He was wearing what looked like a flag patch on his right shoulder, with a field of navy blue on the upper left covered by a pattern of small silver stars, and alternating horizontal red and white bands comprising the remainder. His other shoulder bore a rectangular badge with a stylized VII, probably the gothic numerals for the number seven.

Below the flag patch on his right shoulder, he wore what looked like a circular unit patch, bearing a strange symbol outlined in lines of navy blue on a background the color of a stormy sky. The symbol itself resembled a winged spearhead, pointed downward. Dresden had been running a search in his databases for information on the insignia, but had thus far found nothing.

One other detail that struck him was the fact that this Princeps seemed to bear absolutely no obvious cybernetic augmentations whatsoever. Generally, a man high enough in the ranks of the Mechanicus to be entrusted with the command of a god-machine would be at least one-third robot.

His scans on the interior of the machine had also been scrambled, but he could detect no trace of any Moderatii aboard the machine, or even accommodations for such crewmen. He would have expected at least two; that was the minimum required to safely operate a similarly sized Reaver-Class Titan.

"-Thus, it is imperative that you immediately gain as much technical information on these machines as possible." 07 said.

Dresden shook his head. He was surreptitiously making three separate recordings of the meeting, and could review them at his leisure. In any case, he hated conversing with council members 05, 06, and 07; they were seated directly behind him, and he was not permitted to turn to face them.

"I would question the wisdom of that course of action." Dresden said carefully. "The leader of the Titan group has struck a bargain with the Lord Marshal, which includes an agreement for the privacy of their machines. Violating this agreement now could have significant negative long-term consequences."

"We are the Adeptus Mechanicus! We are not bound by the oaths of the Imperium." 11 said.

"Technically true." Dresden said. "But I can furnish over nine thousand examples of significant legal precedence otherwise. Irrespective of that, I believe currying the favor of this group to be in our best interests for now."

"You have given us much to consider." 01 said. "We will inform you when we have reached a decision. Await further orders."

The monoliths disappeared, plunging the room into darkness. The lights returned a moment later, and Dresden stood up as his desk shut down.

He figured it was about time to break the Marshal's agreement.

[x]

Melissa Black sat at the Deathpoint.

With three classmates on either flank of her and four more children behind her, the unusually tall nine-year-old was in front and center, at the epicenter of pedagogical attention. She was most assuredly not there by choice.

Although given that she had scored just over thirteen percent correct on the latest comprehensive multiple-choice exam, she didn't have many choices these days.

The Ultor Academy was a network of resident schools established to raise the orphaned children of the American military, and later expanded to accept children from the large European and other refugee populations. The intent was to leverage the massive volumes of unattached children generated by the BETA into a useful pool of skilled and loyal men and women.

"Miss Black."

Melissa's head snapped up and she looked at the teacher, a stern woman holding a long holographic stylus in her bionic hand.

"If it would please you," The teacher said, "tell me something pertinent about Sunmaker. What did he do, and how did he get that name?"

"He... saved Africa?" Melissa said hesitantly. "And he used a lot of atomic bombs, hence the name?"

The teacher rolled her eyes. "I was hoping for something a bit more in-depth than the chapter introduction. Still, I suppose that's really my fault for expecting anything from you."

Melissa looked down. She couldn't let her facade of untouchability crack; it was all she had left.

"Now, is there anyone who might have something a bit more substantial to say on this topic?"

A boy in the second row, two seats away from the wall, raised his hand. "Field Marshal Augustus Bismarck Martel has more blood on his hands than any other man in human history, and is also almost without doubt the greatest hero in that same history."

He cleared his throat. "When the BETA forced a crossing of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea at 0430 hours on March 12th, 1986, it became quickly apparent that U.N. forces would not be able to contain them. On March 13th, President Reagan appointed Martel as commander of the U.S. Egyptian Expeditionary Force, with permission to do virtually anything to slow or stop the BETA advance."

The teacher nodded.

"Sunmaker burned himself into the annals of history when, within half an hour of his arrival, he ordered, then personally led, the destruction of the High Aswan Dam on the Upper Nile. This flooded effectively the entire populated region, and killed the majority of the surviving population."

"And why would he do something like that?" The teacher asked.

"Ground pressure and refraction, ma'am." The boy responded. "Destroyer and Grappler-Class BETA exert an extremely high pressure on the ground under their feet. For Fort-Class, that number is at least twenty times higher. And when a beam light moves from one medium of propagation to another, it is deflected slightly."

"Your point?" The teacher asked.

"The floods compromised roads and turned soil into thick mud, as well as spreading a thick layer of sediment on everything." The boy said. "And mud can't stand up to a high pressure."

"So the BETA sank into the ground." Melissa said. She hadn't been thinking, and certainly wouldn't have said anything if she had.

"That's right." The boy said. "With the mobility of the Destroyer-Class compromised, Sunmaker held the Nile Valley for three days. At that point-"

"He nuked the entire site from orbit, then went home and passed out." The teacher said. "I should know; I was there. Thank you for that explanation, Mister Black. Now..."

Class ended an hour later. Melissa stepped out of the history building with a scowl plastered across her face and began sulking toward the dormitory building. She was intercepted about halfway there, in the alley between Chemistry/Biology and Physical Sciences.

The boy from class was standing near the entrance to the alley, just deep enough to avoid being seen from outside.

"What do you want, Michael?" Melissa demanded, fixing her glare on the boy. "I am _not_ in a good mood, and if you don't disappear right now, I will hammer you."

"No, you won't." The boy said. "I'm past my daily quota for beatings, but more importantly, we're both smart enough to know you can't afford another Infraction right now, and attacking me without provocation would probably net you at least two. But you don't want to attack me, because I have an offer for you."

"What could you do for me?"

Michael raised an eyebrow. "For one thing, I could get your grades up."

"How would you do that?" Melissa retorted. "And why would you even care?"

"As I may have mentioned, I get beat up a lot." Michael said. "And as far as I can tell, the Provost will usually let fistcuffs slide, but knives and clubs are off limits. And apparently poisons and electrocution are FROWNED UPON!"

Michael shook his head. "So anyway, I need you to hit people so they don't hit me. If you do that, I'll help you not fail everything."

"...Why would I care about that?" Melissa muttered

"Because you want to be a Tactical Armor Pilot." Michael said. "But currently, you would lucky to make mechanic's mate on a Phantom. With grades like what you're getting now, they'd never let you touch a Widowmaker."

"Fine." Melissa said. "I'll do it."

"Awesome." Michael said. "I need to go over some stuff, so meet me in the library in an hour. Go to the second loft, by the history section in the right corner. I'll be waiting."

He turned to go, then looked back a second later, his face devoid of the glibness it had held a moment before.

"Thank you." He said simply. "Please don't... I need you."

It is said that there are as many responses to the word 'need' as there are people who have ever lived, and that there are seven words that can make a woman fall in love.

Both are completely true.

[x]

Floating in the blissfully warm water of the 'Cleansing pool', Melissa looked up at the intricate tile patterns in the ceiling. Her jet-black hair fanned out behind her head like a terrible simile, and the corners pulled up into a smile.

That day hadn't been a pleasant one, but that fateful encounter, meeting Michael in the alley between Chemistry/Biology and Physical Sciences, had been the best thing that had ever happened to her.

Of course, if Michael hadn't helped her get her grades up and get accepted as a pilot, she never would have been deployed into Normandy, wouldn't have been nuked, and wouldn't been in her current situation.

But really, that wasn't such a big deal, was it?

[x]

Lily Knight stepped out of the bathroom and into the main quarters of the room she had been assigned, wrapped in a bathrobe softer than she would have thought possible.

"Are you finding everything alright?" The young woman assigned as her steward said. "Um, milady?"

"Yeah, it's great." Lily said. "Five stars, for sure."

"I'm glad." She said.

"You aren't actually a steward, are you?" Lilly said.

"Nah." The other woman responded. "Shadowsword gunner Mara Coldsmith, at your service. I took the torso off one of those big Tyranid commander things a couple hours after we showed up, but that brought down everything they had on us. We lost a track and a bunch of the secondaries, so I'm out of a job until that gets fixed."

"You killed a Swarmlord?" Lily said. "That's pretty awesome."

"Actually, it is _the_ Swarmlord." Mara said. "There's only the one."

"But Melissa killed it a few hours ago." Lily said.

"That tends to happen." Mara said. "Apparently, the Tyranid Hive Mind can resurrect the Swarmlord with its memories intact after it dies. According to techpriest Hydrargyrum, that monster has shown up all over the galaxy, usually with pretty drastic consequences for everyone else when it does."

"It looked like a real bitch." Lily said. "So how exactly does one go about becoming a Shadowsword gunner?"

"Well, I was the best Vanquisher gunner in my Secondary Schola Battalion, and when we got activated and attached to the XIII, I did pretty well in our first battle, so they moved me to the _Fist of Sol_ , and I've been there ever since."

"So you joined the Guard right out of school?" Lily asked.

"Nah, we were still months from graduation when we shipped out." Mara said. "We had to finish up the essentials on the ship to the front. So, how long does it take to get a Titan command?"

Lily shrugged. "I don't know what the normal number is, but I've been doing it for a little more than five years now. Sixty-four months, I think."

"Huh. I guess it makes sense that they'd give you good juvenat treatment as a Princeps." Mara said. "I wouldn't have expected you to have been old enough to have been fighting for that long."

"I will have you know I am eighteen years old, thank you very much." Lily said.

"So you started driving a giant robot when you were _twelve_!" Mara exclaimed, eyes widening.

The light left Lily's eyes. "Yeah."

"How did _that_ happen?"

"It was right after Operation Lucifer." Lily muttered, her usual cheerful demeanor vaporized. "When they nuked the BETA Hive in Japan, it was like kicking a nest of snakes, and they started attacking at all the major defense lines. One of the big attacks was on this island called Sumatra, which would have given the BETA a perfect jumping-off point to Australia, my home country. Every formation we had that wasn't committed to Lucifer was rolled out to stop them, and they mobilized reserve units to add throw weight to the counter attack."

"Sounds pretty standard so far." Mara said.

"Yeah, but somehow I found my way into the cockpit of one of the machines scheduled for the operation right before H-Hour." Lily said. "I was fully suited up and everything. By the time I figured out something was wrong, we were under radio silence for the landing."

"How did that happen?" Mara demanded. "That's practically a Munitorum level screwup!"

"That's the real kicker." Lily said, shrugging. "To this day, I have no idea. Sometimes I wonder what would've happened if I hadn't wound up in that Phantom, but I've been a soldier for so long now that I really have no idea what anything else is like. I don't know what I'd do with myself."

Mara said nothing.

"Anyway, we were landing on these hovercraft landing ships. Each one carried a platoon, four TSFs, and could fly right up onto the beach, which was nice. On the other hand, they weren't really assault boats; they had two box launchers and a pair of dual 60mm autocannons, and they didn't have anything in the way of passenger protection. My division started with one hundred and twenty TSFs on thirty landers. I think twenty or twenty one made landfall."

Lily shook her head. "Once we made landfall, it got really bad. Some idiot made the mistake of laying down the little anti-laser smoke we had right on the beach, so the fans from the hovercraft broke it up as we rolled in. I was at the front of my lander and knew nothing about how these things are supposed to work, so I jumped off as soon as we hit land like an idiot. That saved my life."

"How?" Mara asked, her tone subdued.

"The lander ate three lasers a couple of seconds later and got blown to hell, but was far enough away to be safe, and the smoke and sand from the blast gave me enough cover to reach the jungle." Lily smiled. "Once I got there, I saw that the BETA had gotten a bunch of Laser-Class up into the trees, which was giving them a perfect angle to slaughter the landers."

"What did you do?"

"Well, I had a bunch of these thermite/white phosphorus rounds for my Assault Cannon in my spare magazines. I don't know where they came from; they certainly weren't standard issue." Lily closed her eyes and shook her head slightly, a rueful smile flickering across her face. "So after I'd set a couple... dozen... acres of jungle on fire and wiped out the lasers, the landings were going better, and we were ordered inland. I tried to get help, but there wasn't anyone on my division comms net after an hour or so, so I found this sniper rifle and started killing the Laser-Class. I fell in with a company of Gurkhas, and we spent the next couple of months cleaning up Indonesia. After that, I never really looked back."

[x]

"...and six." Tavi said.

Michael felt the dress uniform he had been provided seem to shiver as the auto-creases were activated, giving it that elusive parade-ground perfect look.

It was a bit odd, though, that his insignias appeared to be the eagles of a Colonel rather than the silver bars of a Captain. His left breast carried a large number of unfamiliar decorations arranged into two and a half rows of 'fruit salad', far more than he'd had when fighting the BETA. It also contained rather tasteful hip holsters for his pistols, which Michael was relatively sure were ready to be armed and fired. He hadn't quite figured the altered weapons yet.

"Are you ready to go, sir?" Tavar Gaius Augustus said.

Michael looked at the young man assigned as his aide. The steward was slightly shorter than he was, with a thick head of brown hair cropped to compliance with seemingly universal military regulations. He wore a working uniform mildly decorated with several unfamiliar insignias.

"I'm good." Michael said. "I wanted to go begin overseeing maintenance on my machine. Could you take me to the hanger?"

"I can certainly show you to the Machine Cathedral." Tavi said. "Also, Princeps Elswood is waiting outside. I believe she wishes to accompany you."

"Okay." Michael said. "Let's go."

Tavi walked to the door and pressed a pair of buttons. Half a second later, the heavy door opened, splitting vertically down the middle to reveal Cynthia Elswood, now apparently a Major.

"There you are, sir." She said, crossing her arms under her not inconsiderable chest as she looked at Michael. "We need to talk. What did you research while you were recovering?"

"Military tech and high strategy, mostly." Michael said, marveling at the seeming lack of a seam where the door halves had retracted. "I started with the highest classified databases and worked my way down, focusing on the Imperium and the Tyranids."

He shook his head and sighed. "And I though the BETA were terrifying. These Tyranid... Things are unreal."

"Well, the exact same could be said of some other machines." Cynthia said. "Continuing the previous topic, I spent my time rather more productively; economics, politics, that sort of thing. I think I'm starting to get a grasp of it, but I won't be able to call myself a master anytime soon. The sheer volume of distinction between Imperial planets may make such a thing impossible."

"We can debate the importance later," Michael muttered, then continued normally, "How is our standing, on a planetary scale?"

"Not bad, all things considered." Cynthia said. It was clear from her tone that she had analysed the question at great length. "If we were to contract our combat services to Imperial military commands, I would estimate that we could earn enough wealth to retire to a Paradise World with more than we could conceivably spend in a considerably extended lifespan. Alternatively, we could sell technology from our machines to earn a similar level of wealth. Both have problems, the largest of which would be finding an authority able to command the funds necessary to purchase our services at my rough conservative estimate of their market value."

"I think we may be ignoring something rather important, though." Michael said, tone dry. "Before we can start thinking about Paradise Planets, we would need to get off this planet, which may be something of a challenge."

He cleared his throat. "To clarify, I mean that in the sense of such an action being physically impossible, at least according to Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and William Grey. At present, there are exactly zero spacecraft able to enter and transverse the Warp for superluminal travel, and no facilities capable of producing such a vessel in any reasonable span of time. If any Eldar webway gates are in this system, there would be an even smaller number of vessels able to use them present, and however the Tyranids travel the stars, I doubt they would be willing to take us. Naturally, there is evidence of any G-Elements present with which to construct a Lloyd-Arc Hypercompression Drive, which none of us have any clue how to make."

"There really is no need for that." Cynthia said.

"For what?" Michael responded, raising an eyebrow.

"For imitating my pattern of speech." Cynthia declared, traces of her noble heritage becoming clear in her voice. "It really is irritating."

"Excuse me." Michael said. "I am an engineer, at least in theory. I believe that would permit me some level of elaborate speech."

"Whatever." Cynthia rolled her eyes. "In any case, I think that makes the course of action clear. My family attained its status by putting everything on the table at a critical moment, and I think we need to do the same. We ally ourselves with the XIII mechanized, at least for now, and hold until relieved."

Michael shook his head. "I disagree."

"Really? What would you propose we do?"

"We are going to save this world."

They were silent for the rest of the walk to the hanger.

[x]

A laser-scan ID system swept over the trio as they arrived at the richy ornamented door leading to the Machine Cathedral. Recognizing two authorized visitors, the doors, more than twice the height of a man, swung open in eerie silence revealing the cavernous and dimly lit chamber beyond.

Massive overhead klieg lights snapped on as they entered, revealing the octet of colossi within. They stood in a rough line near the wall right of the door, surrounded by various slightly smaller and multi-limbed machines of all descriptions. Michael detected a faint scent that reminded him of incense, and detected a slight sound reminiscent of Gregorian Chanting at the edge of his hearing.

The sudden illumination also revealed a tall figure bedecked in a long red robe stounded by an arachnophobe's nightmare of mechanical appendages, each of which was interacting with one of a number of much larger machines on the ground.

Michael drew his right pistol and took off toward the figure, crossing the considerable distance between them in no more than twelve or eighteen seconds. He knelt behind one of the larger machines and leveled his pistol at the figure. He had no idea what gunfighting abilities the intruder would have, but he had chosen one of the more important-looking machines to cover behind. If the threat of collateral damage made the figure hesitate for a fraction of a second, that could provide Michael with a decisive advantage.

"Everyone wait a second." The figure said in a clear, strong, surprisingly normal human male voice. "First of all, I don't think we have any reason to start shooting each other and, quite frankly, after watching your combat performance, I would truly loathe doing so. So if you could maybe point that beautiful thing somewhere else, I would be grateful. While some of my colleagues would love having the chance to be shot with a quintessence pistol, those guys are weirdos, and I'd rather not."

"We had an agreement. You appear to be in violation of it." Cynthia said, approaching Michael at a somewhat more restrained pace, her PDW drawn.

"While there _is_ a contrary legal case to be made, I really don't like that sort of thing." The man, Michael assumed he was a Techpriest of the Adeptus Mechanicus, said. "I had expected the positive stimuli of the cleansing pool to delay your arrival longer. Allow me to introduce myself."

He bowed, each of his Mechadendrites turning to face the pair of pilots and mimicking his motion. "I am Techpriest Enginseer Hydrargyrum Dresden, architect of the XIII corps technical excellence and Machine-Adept of passable quality. Lost artifacts found, archeotech investigations, consulting and advice. Reasonable rates; no seduction hypnosis, _replicators_ , or other such nonsense."

Michael said nothing for a moment.

"I'm sorry about breaking the agreement." Dresden said. "But I wasn't in on it, and I could not in good conscience pass up the chance to get a better look at these beauties."

"The viewing fee is one quarter of a billion corps credits." Cynthia responded immediately. "That includes basic database access. Any further technology or information sales many be negotiated at a later date."

"Deal." Dresden said. "It may take some hours to complete the transactions. However, I can transfer thirteen percent of the sum immediately. The money has been placed in escrow; if you would check the dataslate you have been provided, you may set verification information to transfer the funds to an account of your choice."

Cynthia removed her dataslate from her pocket and began tapping out commands.

"You have database access now." Cynthia said. "If you would-"

Dresden blinked. "Dear Omnissiah. It's full of stars."

He shook his head. "I need to see more on this 'Radiation Cannon'. The theory, operating principles, and overall design, at the very least."

"One hundred and fifteen million."

"Done." The Techpriest took a deep breath, as if savoring the air. "I see the beginning of a long a magnificent friendship."

He looked at Michael, then Cynthia. "Vindislinger, Sovereign Breasts, we are going to go a long way together."

"What did you say?"

Michael glanced at Cynthia, shivering at the icy tone of her voice as he judged the distance between her and the ascent elevator of her TSF.

Then his dataslate beeped. Taking a step away and withdrawing the device, he glanced down.

PRNCP-COL BLACK TO CIC XIII ACTUAL SENDS.

Sometimes, discretion is the better part of valor. One of the most important lessons a man can learn is that not every hill is worth dying on.

[x]

Sigrid was waiting for him outside the Combat Information Center, standing in front of the armored door leading into the chamber. She was wearing a dress uniform with a Major's flame, and was staring at him as he rounded the last corner into the CIC antechamber.

"Did the Marshal called you here too?" Michael asked.

"No." Sigrid said. "I have been monitoring your communications. It would have been a hazard to allow my Commanding Officer to meet with well-defended foreign dignitaries alone. Further, regulations strongly suggest that two or more officers are present for potentially critical negotiations."

"So... you tapped my phone."

"Incorrect." Sigrid said. "I simply monitored the transmissions to your unsecured foreign-issue information device."

Michael shook his head. "I'm not even going to think about this right now. Once things regain some semblance of normalcy, I will do my utmost to discipline you for... a lot of things, actually."

Sigrid reached up to the top button of her uniform and looked off to the side. "I will, of course, except any punishment you see fit to order."

She undid the first button and began working on the second.

Michael closed his eyes. "Sigrid, I-"

The doors to the CIC slid open. The movement took less than a second, but was almost completely noiseless. A tall man in an elaborate uniform subtly different from the formal dress of the XIII Corps stood in the doorway. He looked at the pair, smiling.

"Ah, the passions of youth." The man said. His hair was silvery-white and he appeared to be considerably older than most of the soldiers and officers Michael had seen around the base, but his face bore few lines, and he stood with a posture that bespoke strength and confidence.

"However, the Lord Marshal is waiting for you, so if you would be so kind as to accompany me to the Combat Information Center Strategic Plot Chamber..."

"Of course." Michael said quickly, glancing at Sigrid and gesturing for her to fix her buttons.

The man nodded and led them through the armored door.

Michael looked around as he entered the CIC. It was a surprisingly large space, with an ambient light level somewhat below that of the outside hallways. The space along three of the walls, judging by the signage, were dedicated to monitoring the status of various units and formations, from the division all the way down to the battalion level. The center for of the room was filled with rows of workstations dedicated to other tasks, and an elevated platform ran along the back wall of the room.

The man led Michael and Sigrid down one of the isles and up to the platform. He pressed a button next to another door, which slid open to reveal a small, better lit room.

Lord Marshal Alberich Vesperia looked up from the holographic display board. "Ah, thank you Walter. You may go attend to... whatever it is you do. As for you, Princeps-Colonel, I wanted to discuss a few things with you."

He glanced at Sigrid. "Is she trustworthy?"

"Incredibly, sir." Michael said. "Her faults lie elsewhere."

Alberich waved a hand. "No need for such formality. You've earned that, at the absolute least. Thank you again for your assistance on the field today. We haven't finalized our casualty numbers, but they were mercifully light. As for the enemy... Well, I'd say that when you need to break out the construction equipment to gather their dead for incineration, you've done _something_ right."

"Wait, really?" Michael said.

"Yes. I have the entrenchment bulldozers pushing piles of dead tyranids into these huge pits, where the soldiers can hose them down with Promethium." Alberich chuckled. "I'm sure has all sorts of awful long-term effects; but I can't have such a massive infection hazard that close to my line."

"I understand. It just seems... Extreme."

"We live in an extreme age." Alberich shook his head, then turned back to the holographic display. "For example, I can say with utmost certainty that we killed more than ten million Tyranid combat organisms today. But despite that, our defeat here is still a foregone conclusion."

"What do you mean?" Michael said. "We secured an improved defensive position, and inflicted insane casualties on the enemy forces. Their field commander and prime linebreaker organisms are dead, and my squadron remains in prime operational condition for a repeat performance. How are we still doomed?"

"First and foremost, it is a question of numbers." The Marshal taped a few commands into the holotable, sighing as a map of the theater of Operations appeared. "Namely, numbers that we simply don't have. Losses just don't matter to the Tyranids in the same way they do to us; many of their smaller combat organisms actually lack digestive systems. Once deployed, they are expected to die before their energy reserves are depleted. Their 'economy', as it were, isn't impacted by mass recruitment and casualties like that of a human world, and they are utterly devoid of any sort of moral or emotional concerns."

Michael frowned, but said nothing. He was far too familiar with the concept of such a species.

"There are three other passes between the infested Coastplain and the Central Highlands. Ours is by far the largest, but the forces holding the other passes are of much lower quality and are suffering steady, severe attrition. Even disregarding travel time, we can't spare the forces to support them, but if one of those passes falls, this whole planet dies, including my entire Corps."

Alberich shook his head. "But this is the icing on the cake. We've kicked their teeth here hard enough to get some suborbital recon drones in the air. Take a look."

Michael watched intently as the map zoomed out to show the Tyranid-infested territory, watching the movements of markers indicating the location of alien force concentrations. After a moment, he pointed at a smallish peninsula jutting out from the northern shore of the Coastplain, several thousand miles behind the main lines.

"That is a macrophage central hive." He said confidently. "Probably one of their centers of production, and certainly a center of command."

Alberich smiled. "My thoughts exactly. Now when we take a closer look..."

The image on the display changed, showing the peninsula on the entire table. A large, jagged mountain featured prominently near the center of the landmass.

"That mountain wasn't there when this planet was settled." Alberich said. "Or even when the last census was taken. Unfortunately, as of yesterday evening, I have no idea how I would go about deploying a large force there."

Michael entered a few queries into the holotable, then smiled.

"I think I might have a few ideas."

[x]

Keter walked into the Machine Cathedral housing the TSFs of Windrunner Squadron and looked around. The air was cold enough to notice, and the scents of ozone, incense, and a few other unfamiliar odors filled the air.

Melissa and Natasha were standing near the Techpriest Dresden as he conducted the movements of the dozens of servitors, automata, and acolytes throughout the hanger, weaving a symphony from the maelstrom of motion. The three of them were standing on a slightly elevated platform which radiated cables and at least three of what appeared to be hydraulic cables like an artistic sun.

The platform was surrounded by a variety of monitors, holographic displays, and control panels, all of which combined to effectively block sight onto the platform. Keter was mildly surprised by the amount of decoration on the equipment, but she was quickly realized that was par for the course.

Massive shipping containers lined the entire wall opposite where Windrunner Squadron's machines were lined up, stacked several units high and deep. On closer inspection, Keter realized that they appeared to be the slightly modified intermodal shipping containers used globally by the human forces allied against the BETA. She was fairly sure they weren't supposed to have so many skull emblems and decorative cogs, but she had seen enough today to ignore that.

Elsewhere in the massive chamber, Cynthia sat at what looked like a hastily assembled work terminal, surrounded by computers displays and open books. She was working furiously, though she occasionally looked up to bark an order at a servitor or shoot a glare at the Techpriest.

Lily was standing near the line of eight still giants, each of which was now enveloped in a scaffold of metal and plasteel. All eight scaffolds supported a multitude of servitors, each outfitted with at least a dozen servo-arms and mechadendrites. The servitors were overseen by a red-robed acolytes, four or five on each of the TSFs. Lily herself was walking up and down the line of giant robots, shouting orders at the acolytes on the frames and occasionally poking a servitor with what looked like an oversized cyberpunk cattle prod.

Keter could see a dark blue sliver of what looked like Miharu behind a large machine, but she had no idea what the midget might be doing there.

"All right, all right, time to get to work. If all Princeps present would meet me at the Provisional Operations Center, that would be great."

As the voice of the techpriest boomed from the speakers mounted in the trusses running along the ceiling, Keter raised an eyebrow, then began walking towards the platform. She arrived and, after a brief pause, stepped up onto the 'provisional operations center'.

"Alright people." Dresden said, turning away from his command console as the pilots assembled. "We have a lot of ground to cover, and an uncertain but short span of time to cover it. Now, first things first; these machines are pretty much the best thing ever. There are a few things in basilicas and stasis vaults back on Mars that might have a higher concentration of absolute awesomeness, but most of those artifacts are one-of-a-kind, partially or totally broken, unreliable, unusable, and/or mind-bogglingly dangerous. Probably at least three of those. These unbelievably beautiful manifestations of divinity are none of those."

He shook his head. "Anyway, item two. I was going through the supply containers that arrived with these beauties, and I found-"

"What supply containers?" Keter muttered. "When did they show up?"

"No idea." Dresden said. "But we checked them for Chaos contamination or Necron Bullshit, and they came up clean, so I went ahead and cracked them. Anyway, I found a pair of Energy Projectors in one of the boxes. According to the attached notes, they're actually a head-mounted post-production modification for the red one. On the topic of the red one, I'm disappointed that it appears to be one of the slower machines in your group. I would have expected-"

"Shoddy Russian engineering." Melissa said, shaking her head dramatically. "Frankly, I'm surprised something like this hasn't happened sooner."

"This thing is true." Natasha responded, speaking in an exaggerated Russian accent. "I have embezzled many ruble to bribe maintenance teams so this thing hurts me in battle less often."

"Anyway, all of the necessary system architecture was already in place on the red one, so I was preparing for installation. With your approval, I'll move ahead with that. I should be able to have that done in a few hours, by midnight tonight at the outside."

"Ah yes, this thing seems very good." Natasha said, continuing in her theatrical tone. "More guns is never a bad thing for a defender of the Motherland to have."

She shook her head, then cleared her throat and continued normally. "Although, what the hell is an Energy Projector?"

"I'm not entirely sure." Dresden said. "I'll have a better idea once I finish my analysis, which should be finished in an hour or two. But I've tested each of the subsystems without firing, and I am... Upwards of eighty percent sure it's completely safe."

"You talk a lot, don't you?" Keter said.

"You have fewer emotions than most Magos, don't you?" Dresden retorted. "On the topic of item three, there is a _lot_ we can learn from these machines. That being said, the rest of my organization tends to frown on this sort of thing. Speaking metaphorically, at least, a lot of them don't have much organic face left. In any case, you can most likely trust me, but be _extremely_ careful around any other member of the Mechanicus."

"But how do we know we can trust you?" Melissa said, tilting her head. "How do we know you aren't running a scam, trying to monopolize our tech and telling us this so we don't look for other options?"

"I am reasonably confident that we can trust him." Cynthia said, crossing her arms as she stepped forward, irritation clear in her voice. "I've done a lot of reading on the AdMech, and what HAL here is saying is accurate. If anything, he's understating the danger. Worlds have been burned for less."

Cynthia pulled her dataslate out of her pocket and entered a few commands. "Also, if he's scamming us, it would basically be academic to us; as of five minutes ago, we are all in the top point two percent of the upper hundredth of the first percent of the estimated Imperial population when indexed by wealth. With the dedicated cut of the income from applications of our tech, one point for each of us, I should be able to make a fairly major improvement on that stat, assuming we survive the next year."

"Yeah. Whatever she said." Desden rolled his eyes. "This information is probably worth a lot more than I'm paying you for it, but I don't think you'd be able to find anyone willing and able to make you a better offer within ten thousand light-years. Now, I have a few maintenance tasks I need each of you to oversee on each of your machines, excluding you, Keter. I have to ask you a few questions."

[x]

Michael plotted out a suborbital flight trajectory on the holoboard, then began a simulation of the Tyranid aerospace defenses.

A blue dot representing a squadron of Atherlight gunships appeared over the center of the Highlands, rapidly gaining altitude and velocity as it moved west. Red spots and splotches began appearing in the infesting territory, representing known or projected locations of Tyranid anti-air capability.

Tiny red threads began flickering up from the AA sites toward the squadron, representing incoming fire. Most missed the squadron, but some portion of it, based on observed Tyranid AA capability, struck home.

As a fairly close relative of the Stormraven used by the Adeptus Astartes, the resilient hull of the Aetherlight Gunship was well-armored on all sides. Its defenses were further augmented by a Flare Shield which, when focused downward, provided considerable defense against ground-based anti-aircraft fire. However, the sheer volume of Tyranid Anti-Aircraft fire was more than capable of overwhelming the defenses, and the squadron dot was trailing casualty markers within seconds.

Thirty seconds later, all twelve craft were gone.

Michael tried again with three squadrons, both in close formation and with significant separation. The survival time of each craft increased slightly, but in both configurations, every single craft was destroyed before it could cover more than five percent of the distance to the target. When separate, both groups took too much ground fire, and the combined squadron was swarmed and overwhelmed by interceptors.

Frowning, Michael increased the force to twelve Aetherlight squadrons, separated into six groups of twenty-four craft each. He changed the mission profile from evasion at best speed to a mix of evasion and engagement at best practical speed.

As the Imperial Guard possessed no Dreadnoughts, the mag-grapples a Stormraven could use to transport one were of little use on an Aetherlight. Instead, it used its rear heavy-lift space to mount a large remote-controlled turret capsule. The turret carried a large rotary railgun, which fired enlarged Thunderfire Cannon shells at high velocity. While the turret could not fire at a target forward of the gunship and same altitude, it was highly effective at engaging ground targets in all directions.

This time, as soon as the gunships rose above the enemy's horizon, they began firing controlled bursts at known anti-air sites and those revealed themselves by opening fire.

Casualty markers began appearing on both sides, but as Michael glanced at the ammo graph for the gunships, he realized it wouldn't be enough. Resetting the simulation, Michael set the simulation for sixteen groups of thirty-six gunships each.

Forty-eight craft reached the target. Each Aetherlight carried twelve passengers and had a crew of three. The operation he had just simulated would have cost nearly eight thousand lives simply getting the assault force to the target.

And with so few survivors, they would have almost no chance of success.

If he were to use more aircraft, the elevated survival rate might allow him to put more throw weight on target, but... Michael shook his head. They were kidding themselves. This would be the Kashgar Drop all over again, but with no HI-MAERF Superweapon to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Operation Ouka had been a tremendous victory, but the Orbital Drop onto the original hive had been a completely pyrrhic victory, one of the few offensive operations in history to achieve decisive victory, despite the attacking forces not simply suffering 100% casualties, but actually being killed to a man.

Of course, that had been due to human action, not the BETA. Yuuko Kouzuki, the brilliant quantum scientist who had made considerable contributions to the war effort up to that point, had been in partial command of the Kashgar drop in an advisory role. However only a few hours before the operation, she tampered with the Hive map data loaded to the TSFs of the U.S./UN forces dropping alongside the Japanese force escorting the HI-MAERF Mobile Fortress, sending their exfiltration route back into the heart of the hive.

There were no survivors.

The United States, along with several other nations that had contributed forces to the operation, demanded her execution. Victory in war can earn forgiveness for many sins, but High Treason is not among them. Kouzuki stood before a firing squad three weeks later.

Michael sighed. That was irrelevant; they didn't have the Susuanaoo. But that was absurd; giant flying war machines equipped with powerful shields and devastating weapons did just fall out of the-

For a moment, Michael felt so stoopid that he was going to explode.

Before he could begin devising a new plan, the indicator light on his dataslate blinked, indicating he had a message.

PRNCP-COL BLACK TO UP OBV DCK

Michael frowned; all messages on that system were supposed to include a sender tag.

"Just go." The Lord Marshal said. "Dresden can take his name off the message, and he has a tendency to do things that don't make a lot of sense to anyone else until after the fact. The observation deck is secure, so you should probably just go."

"Um, what is the observation deck?" Michael asked.

"It's the roof of the headquarters building." Marshal Alberich said. "We put up some shields so the HQ staff can take breaks up there. It's good for a person to have the chance to see the sky from time to time. The route is on your dataslate."

[x]

Keter frowned as Dresden finished explaining the experiment. It seemed reasonable when he explained it, but as she thought about it, it just didn't make sense.

"So, you want me to turn on that laser cutter mill on the other side of the room without actually touching it." Keter said, in her usual flat tone. "I cannot use any form of wireless contact, or network a connection to the object. Correct?"

"Essentially." Dresden said. "Though you're welcome to try a wireless broadcast; that device was never built with any sort of transmission or reception capability, and its casing forms an effective Faradelius Cadge. Plus, the only connection to anything in here is the power supply, and trying to encode any kind of information in one of those can have an interesting effect on a machine like this."

He coughed polity. "Funny story."

Keter closed her eyes. "Do you have any idea how I'm supposed to do this?"

"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free." Dresden said, almost as if her were reciting a psalm. "But that only permitted the machines themselves to enslave them. Mastery is the only advice I can offer."

"Fine. I'll try it." Keter muttered.

Of course, that was disregarding the fact that she had absolutely no idea what she was supposed to do.

After a moment's thought, she considered the warhead she had detonated during the battle with the Tyranids. That shouldn't have been possible either, but everyone seemed certain that she had done it.

She went back to that moment and tried to remember everything that she had done in those few moments. The only unusual thing she could recall was a sensation of _reaching out_ toward the warhead, and then nothing.

With no other ideas, Keter attempted to replicate the sensation. In a manner she would have, for nearly all of her life, considered foolish, she gathered her mind and pushed it _outward_.

And exploded.

Keter was her titan, seeing the world thought all of its various sensor arrays, attaining a level of unity with her machine the greatest of _eishi_ would have envied.

Keter was the XIII Corps headquarters, looking at the hundreds of soldiers staffing it not simply thought the security cameras, but feeling them thought the environmental systems, even as she became dimly aware of entire human force disposition on the planet.

Keter was the planetary datanet. Damaged though it was, it still formed a web of information across the surface of the planet. She could feel herself rising outward toward the orbital installations.

Keter existed across and _around_ the planet for a moment, and then she felt herself be drawn into the astropathic relays, and _outward_.

Keter no longer knew the words, if any existed, to describe her existence. Her consciousness was spread over tens of thousands of light-years; she was fairly sure that the fact that she was still capable of coherent, thought, or any thought at all, was a gross violation of several laws of physics. She was aware of her semi-unconscious correction for the variances in temporal progression caused by the different speeds of her mind-node-worlds, and when she looked inward, she could _see_ the gravatic curvature of space in her being.

Keter existed in a state she could no longer comprehend. Everything was a constant flux, an infinite sea of tiny motes of light whirling on the winds of time. There were presences, vast and powerful and _other_. Acting on instinct, she reached out and grabbed one of the lights.

And then Keter was in the cockpit of her Titan, gasping for breath and glancing at the strange-yet-familiar displays and controls, reassuring herself that she still existed. Nothing seemed to be physically wrong, but she felt like she should have been left a gibbering wreck by... whatever just happened. However, as far as she could tell, she had passed her SAN check.

She shrugged. Time would tell. She had nothing better to do, so she extended a tendril of her consciousness toward the laser cutter. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, a series of indicator lights on the control panel of the device activated. Keter's eyes widened; she could feel the machine, as if it were a numb, detached limb. There was a vague feeling of sadness about the device, and as Keter began examining it, she realized that several of the radiative heaters in the primary plasma generator were nonfunctional.

So she fixed them. She did it without thinking, like stretching her arm. It wasn't until the indicator runes illuminated and a red glow began emanating from the open hatch on the top of the machine that she realized what had happened.

Keter said nothing for a moment.

"It's not a laser cutter mill." She said. "It's a plasma crucible, and I think it was broken."

"By the Omnissiah." Dresden breathed. "He shall know your ways as though born to them."

"What is that?" Keter said. "Some sort of prophecy?"

"No idea." Dresden muttered, as he became increasingly obscured within a whirlwind of holographic displays. "But for a lot of people, this is going to be a big deal. The sort of thing that gets entire worlds killed."

[x]

Michael pushed open the blast door and stepped out onto the roof of the XIII Corps Headquarters. It looked much as he had expected; a flat surface of dark grey ceramic ferrocrete surrounded by a raised lip of same four feet tall. It was dotted by rectangular 'benches' and 'tables' made of a variety of materials, which he guessed were more likely to be construction debris than furniture.

The predawn darkness was held at bay by an array of klieg lights, He hadn't realized how much time had passed since his squad had arrived; he had been too engrossed in planning the operation to spare much thought for anything else.

As he took another step forward, Michael caught sight of Melissa standing near one of the railings, facing away from him. She was looked eastward, toward the direction of the Tyranid horde. Her jet-black hair hung down past her shoulders, blending well with the black of the uniform she had been issued. Michael began walking toward her, wondering what she was doing there. Alberich had said Dresden was able to manipulate the messaging system and had probably called him to the roof, but...

Melissa turned as he approached. Her emerald eyes seemed to glitter as she did so, and Michael froze for a moment. Had she been crying?

"Melissa..." Michael began. He had no idea what to say; but then, he had no idea what was going on.

"Michael, I asked Dresden to call you up here to... Before we go out there..." She hesitated, then continued. "I need to tell you something."

"What is it?" Michael said softly, stopping a few feet away from her.

She seemed so different from the Melissa Black Michael had practically grown up with. In one way or another, both of them had lost everything to the BETA. They'd had no one else to depend on, and that heat had tempered their bond. They'd essentially become siblings.

Melissa had always been the strong one, the fighter, in more than a handful of ways. She had been the one to enlist, when Michael had gone for a combination Undergraduate/Pilot OCS program. But now, seeing her like this, even bedecked in formal martial attire, she see seemed so... delicate, but no less wonderful for that.

"Before we go out there to fight the Tyranids, I think I need to tell you..." She looked down and took a deep breath. "I love you."

"But... Of course. I love you too. You're my sister."

Melissa smiled ruefully. "Not like that. I mean... I think I have for a while, maybe even since we first met, but I don't think I realized it until you were transferred to Windrunner Squadron. I wanted to tell you, but... I was afraid, just like always."

Michael felt a confusing mix of emotions. He had lost control of the situation, if he'd ever had any in the first place. Any yet, that didn't seem to bother him nearly as much as it should have. He looked back at Melissa and felt... something. He realized that the frailty he had seen in her was not the inherent weakness of porcelain statuette, but rather the delicacy of an unfinished white-hot sword on the forging block. Yes, it could be ruined in an instant, but it was in a transient state, and could become so much more.

She closed her eyes. "I'm a coward. I've always been so weak... I-"

"Don't be absurd." Michael said, glancing at the faintly glowing eastern horizon and taking a step toward her. "You're probably the bravest person I've ever met. Fighting the BETA, and now the Tyranids... You're incredible."

"That... That's easy, though." She said, thin trails of tears running down her face. "I need to fight, or people will get hurt. When you're there... I fight to protect you, the one thing I _can_ do. The only thing I've ever been able to do. The only reason I'm even able to talk to you now is because I couldn't stomach the thought of dying without letting you know... I'm pathetic. You deserve someone less worthless."

"What are you talking about?" Michael said. "You're wonderful. You're always friendly, and relaxed, and optimistic and... And _you_."

Michael squinted, the glow from the east beginning to become noticeably intense. "I don't know how I could have made it this far without you."

Melissa's eyes shot open. She looked at Michael for a frozen instant that stretched out to eternity. To the east, the first sliver of the disk of the sun crept above the distant horizon.

And then Melissa reached up and pulled Michael into a kiss.

The commander of Windrunner Squadron, Hero of Rovaniemi Hive and Liberator of Scandinavia, entered a state known in some circles as 'deadlock'. He was overwhelmed by a multitude of thoughts, impulses, concerns, and desires pushing and pulling in a thousand directions at once, holding him suspended in place.

The Officer and the Gentleman drew steel and crossed blades for a moment, then turned to face as one an altogether more savage aspect of themselves. A thousand concerns played thought Michael's mind at once, but all of them faded to grey with the sudden realization of just how nice Melissa's kiss felt.

He also realized that there was only one course of action that would preserve the integrity of his squadron as a fighting force, at least for the short term. Some portion of him considered the possibility that he was rationalizing, but that didn't seem like that much of a concern.

Michael reached out to embrace Melissa returning the kiss.

And the two melted into each other as the sun crested the horizon.

He couldn't have said how long it lasted, but eventually, they pulled apart.

"Michael, I-"

"Get down!" Michael shouted, grabbing Melissa's shoulder and pulling her down.

"What is it?" Melissa muttered, alert professionalism returning to her in a moment.

"Aircraft inbound from occupied area." Michael muttered, peeking up over the wall. "One, large, closing fast."

Melissa rose to a crouch to look over the wall, eyes narrowing as she did so.

"It's one of ours." She said, after a moment. "I think we're fine."

"How can you tell?" Michael asked, raising an eyebrow.

"It's not flapping." Melissa said. "All of the Tyranid flyers flap."

"Huh. I wouldn't have thought of that." Michael said, standing up. "Good work."

He frowned as the aircraft approached. "I wonder why it isn't slowing down. It's pretty high up, too..."

"Maybe it's a scout?"

"I don't know..." Michael shook his head. "Anyway, I think we need to-"

He was cut off by a roar of wind as the aircraft shot overhead, seeming to pull a tempest behind it. Michael and Melissa both crouched against the wind, raising arms to protect their eyes. The gale passed quickly, and Michael was able to look up to see a massive figure in resplendent plate mail drop out of the sky. The figure landed in a crouch and held the position for a moment, then rose to his full height, standing head and shoulders above Michael.

His armor was incredibly intricate, perfectly interlocking plates of bright burnished silver highlighted with brilliant scarlet. He carried a massive shimmering claymore as long as Michael was tall in his right hand, and in his other he held a shield emblazoned with a golden Aquila, along with an unfamiliar symbol of red, silver, and green. His armor was adorned with a variety of other decorations, and his helmet was removed. His skin seemed unnaturally, pale, almost pallid, though it had hints of an odd metallic sheen, contrasting with his pitch-black close-cropped hair.

Then Michael noticed his eyes.

The sclera of his eye was the color of polished sliver rather than milky white, and it surrounded an iris of radiant red and orange. It was hard to tell in the morning light, but Michael thought the iris might actually be glowing slightly. At least the pupil seemed normal.

As the newcomer stood, Michael realized what he had to be.

This man was a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes.

"A Space Marine." Melissa whispered.

"I," The Marine announced, "Am Captain-Errant Horatius Quirinus, of the Seraphim Radiant."

He paused for a moment.

"Take me to your leader."


	6. Olympus Knights Nine Halves: Interludes

**Olympus Knights**

 **Interludes**

Lord Marshal Alberich Vesperia glanced up from his work. Picking the units for the Hive Assault was difficult. Choosing men for a suicide mission always was.

He glanced at one of shelves and frowned. One of the statuettes appeared to be shimmering.

The statute was made of stone and vaguely humanoid, though it appeared melted, as if it had been exposed to an insane heat. It was also not supposed to shimmer.

Alberich pressed the concealed rune activating his defense systems and stood up, pushing his chair back as he reached for the hilt of his sword.

A point of light appeared in the air near the door of the office. It extended downward, forming a line perhaps seven feet tall.

The line seemed to _rotate_ , opening into a square of light. A shape appeared in the light, blurry and indistinct. It grew clearer, resolving into a humanoid silhouette.

Then a foot clad in a seamless boot of dark grey appered out of the portal, followed by a leg clad in armor of the same material. As Alberich caught sight of the symbol on the arming cloak accompanying said leg, he tensed. This was not an assassination attempt.

This was something far worse.

Alberich sighed as Farseer Ashalaria of Craftworld Sernelda entered his office in full battlefield regalia. Frankly, he wished it'd been the Swarmlord.

The Farseer's armor was somewhat bulkier than normal for an Eldar, and was uniformly colored a deep shade of grey. She wore relatively simple robes of lighter grey over her mail, the chest emblazoned in rich emerald with the symbol of her craftworld; Alberich though it looked like a double-pupiled eye made of eight smaller circles, with wings of mirrored geometric outlines extending to either side.

The inhuman monstrosity removed her helmet, letting her long, rich, pick hair spill out onto her shoulders.

"Alberich." She said, stepping forward. "It's been far too long!"

"It has." Alberich responded, tone neutral. "Have you gained weight?"

The Seer's eyes lit up. Abruptly, she grabbed a chair, pulled it in front of the desk, and sat down.

"Oh, you noticed!" She said, in slightly accented but mechanically perfect Gothic. "This is my new Wraithcuirass Active Combat Suit. I was leading a strike team against an Ork camp, and while I was there, I noticed that your Spess Mehreens getting shot and not dying, and I realized that maybe your 'powered armor' idea wasn't as silly as the Exarchs always say it is. So when I got back home, I started working on what you humans call a potatotype."

"That's _prototype_ and _Space Marine_." Alberich said, his voice as dry as Europa isn't. "And I think _Wraithmail_ might be a better name. But I'm impressed. I wasn't under the impression that your people were involved in technological development. From what I've read, you've used more or less the same gear at least since the Heresy."

"That is accurate." The Farseer responded, reaching up to her collar and pressing two dark splotches near the base of her neck. "Even this isn't really new just yet. I chopped up a few Wraithguard chassis and used a Dark Reaper Suit as a template. It's a step in the right direction, but it isn't nearly good enough yet, and there are still some control... problems."

As she finished speaking, the upper section of her chestplate detached from the rest of the suit with a hiss, falling into her hands. She set the plate on the desk, armored surface facing down, revealing the inner workings of the plate and the think, from-fitting black garment the Eldar wore beneath it.

Alberich looked at the backside of the plate, examining the power conduits and runecarvings that formed the basis for much of the semi-psychic technology of the Eldar race. He had learned the basics principles of the craft, and a surprising about of it was similar to the more advanced aspects of human technology once you knew how look at it.

"I think you've got a lot of the core principals, but the layout and design is a bit crowded." Alberich said.

Ashalaria tilted her head. "What do you mean?"

"That's what Dresden would say, at any rate." Alberich looked up. "He said it was an early mistake he made when he was still figuring out the basics of R&D. He said he would try to cram as many components together to maximize a few things without considering how it they would work together, or how the machine would operate in the field."

The Farseer frowned.

"For example, I think you've got more synthetic muscle blocks than your control lines can properly handle." Alberich ran a finger over one of the strings of runes. "First of all, that provides a single point of failure, which is bad for almost anything you expect to have people shooting at. But in this case, it's cutting into your control precision and command propagation time."

"I see." Ashalaria tilted her head. "I never really thought about the little details like that..."

"You had to figure out all the basics. You're the first of your kind to try this sort of thing for eons."

"I know." Ashalaria muttered, looked downward. "Twelve thousand years... and we have nothing to show for it. We killed our civilization once, and damn near dragged the rest of the Galaxy with us, and we react by going into Safe Mode and never coming out."

Alberich said nothing. He had talked to Ashalaria several times before, and had always thought that she was absolutely nothing like what any of the official sources - the useful ones, not the mass-consumption propaganda - said an Eldar Farseer should be like. She seemed too genuine, too honest, both to herself and others.

For the life of him, Alberich couldn't figure out what her angle was.

"The old ways worked, but we lost at least as much as we still know, and the Galaxy is a different place now." She shook her head. "Tyranids, Necrons, and a dozen fledgling pocket empires..."

"You don't want to be left behind." Alberich said. "But the core of your society has too much institutional inertia to set a course away from the precipice."

He smiled grimly. "Trust me, I know what that's like."

Ashalaria looked up, her heavenly blue eyes meeting his. "I want to change things. But even now, with all my power, I don't know how."

"Speaking as an official representative of the Imperium, I hope it stays that way." Alberich said. "You seem likely to effect change positive to a xeno species, and likely to increase the capability of that species to threaten the Imperium."

"But why does it have to be that way?" Ashalaria said. "What makes us inherently and immutably hostile towards each other?"

"Well, the Craftworlds are largely self-sufficient and the material demands of our technology bases are completely different, so it can't be competing demands for resources." Alberich tilted his head in exaggerated contemplation. "We don't interact enough to significantly impact the self-determination of either of our species, or impose any sort of externalities on each other. So I suppose we hate each other's guts."

"But why would _that_ be?"

Alberich shrugged. "How else would it be? We've been fighting for a thousand generations. I've never heard of any other possibility."

He smiled slightly. "That's just how things are. What good is asking why?"

"So... You're saying there _is_ no reason?" Ashalaria muttered.

Alberich nodded.

"But... How could nobody have noticed something like that?"

"Some things are only visible from an outsider's perspective." Alberich said. "Intestines, for example."

Ashalaria smiled slightly.

"But I'd guess that a majority of those with the necessary information wouldn't _want_ to notice." The Lord Marshal shrugged. "And those who would care enough to piece it together _and_ be willing to see the full picture would likely lack the power to change anything, or the desire to commit to such an endeavor."

Alberich could see the Eldar looking at him contemplatively. He found his eyes wandering, drawn to her brilliant eyes, luscious fuchsia hair, the perfect microrelief of her chest...

He pressed his lips together. He was being manipulated; he had mastered such impulses long ago. He glanced at the psycholabe on his desk. Faint blue and green sparks flickered in its depths, indicating the presence of biomancy and telepathy. The signature of the psionic energy indicated it was incredibly weak, far less than he would have thought to be useful.

"Of course, things like psychic manipulation of leaders is a great way to create paranoia and distrust in a population." He said mildy. "Wars of annihilation have begun over less."

The psycholabe went dark.

"So easy to begin." Ashalaria said softly. "And yet so hard to end."

"From one perspective." Alberich said. "From another, all you need to end a war is to annihilate the ability of one side to fight."

Ashalaria said nothing for a moment.

"My father saw it, I think." She closed her eyes. "I've seen the records, and I was born the same hour as the outpost of your Imperium on Tyran Prime fell. I first assumed the office of Provisional Autarch around the same time as the Sanctuary 101 incident. I know searching for signs is a short route to obliteration, but..."

"You were an Autarch?" Alberich said, raising an eyebrow. "I was under the impression that assuming that role marked a point of no return."

"It does." Ashalaria muttered. "It should. But I left anyway."

Ashalaria looked intently at Alberich. "Do you know what my name means?"

He shook his head.

"Witness to the dying fire." She said. "To see the end approaching, to know it for what it is, and to watch the last of the light in creation fall into ashes. That is my burden, my Wyrd."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

"What?"

"Doom and gloom, end of the world, everything is on fire." Alberich said plainly. "If that's such a big deal, then cancel the Apocalypse. You should know better than anyone that the future is simply shifting possibilities."

She stared at him for a moment. "You can say that... You can say that like it isn't crazy. And believe it."

"Only the insane have strength enough to survive. Only the survivors may truly judge what is sane." Alberich said.

"That..." Ashalaria sighed. "I suppose that's exactly the attitude that has allowed your kind to come this far. The sort of attitude you would need to survive the storm on the horizon."

Alberich took a deep breath, then reached forward and pressed several runes on one of the dataslates lying on his desk. He waited for ten heartbeats, then reached down and removed a small datashard from a slot built into the frame and set it on the table.

He pushed it towards the xeno sitting across from him.

"Design notes for the Mark VII Aquila Armor." He said. "They won't tell you how to build it, but they say a lot about how it's built. But you might be more interested in the rather extensive information on how _not_ to build power armor."

"Wha... But..." She seemed stunned. "Why would you do this? Are you insane?"

"I've been called that. I wonder if it's true, some days." Lord Marshal Amberich Vesperia said, leaning back in his seat and tilting his head up. "But why? I read something rather interesting, once."

He straightened and looked forward.

"Somebody has to start. Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right." He said, tone heavy. "A hundred centuries of war cannot be ended by reciprocation."

"But you don't just..."

He shrugged. "You fight our mutual foes a lot more than you fight us. I'd wager that the Imperium will gain more from this investment than we lose."

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Alberich wondered if the Eldar had some sort of facial leak, or if he should offer her a handkerchief. Then again, for all he knew, that could be the Eldar equivalent of throwing down the gauntlet. He most certainly did _not_ want to find himself in a deathmatch with Ashalaria. She was probably the single most personally dangerous entity he knew.

"You're..." She shook her head, reaching up to her neck and pulling something out from under the underlayer of her armor. "You are incredible, in the true sense of that word. Impossible to believe."

She held up a thin necklace chain, with a black ring and a pair of silvery boxes perhaps big enough to fit the last section of the Farseer's pinky finger. She removed the two boxes and placed them on the desk, then set the ring down in front of them.

"You might find these interesting. A gift deserves as reply. I simply ask that you keep them within your formation, which shouldn't be hard." She pointed at one box.

"Windrider and vyper specs. You couldn't build one without a bonesinger, but I'm sure your techpriest can work something out." She pointed at the other. "Specter Jetpack specs. Same construction problem, but it should be nice to have something to counter Tau JSJ shenanigans."

"Thank you. I will abide by your conditions." Alberich said. "I assume the ring is some form of assurance of that?"

"N- No." Ashalaria shook his head. "It is a token. A token of what I hope we could do together."

She smiled. "Just like at Vulkangrad."

"I suppose that was something of a coup."

"It was more than that. Phaeron Hatshepsut won't be invading any more of your planets ever again."

"You mean that stunt actually worked?" Alberich said, raising an eyebrow.

"The vortex warhead you lodged on her command barge phased out with her." Ashalaria said. "But when I took her head, she fled back to her dynasty _Crownworld_."

Alberich smirked, and Ashalaria mirrored the expression a moment later.

"The bomb overperformed, though." Ashalaria continued. "As soon as she arrived in her regeneration chamber, it detonated, but the null matrix generators protecting the room overloaded and actually amplified the vortex. It cut a hole in the heart of Tomb World twelve miles across."

"And it turns out that Inquisitor Tanikaze had been monitoring the planet. As soon as he saw the opening, he rounded up the entire sector fleet and moved in."

"How did that go?" Alberich asked.

"The only way it can be allowed to go." Ashalaria said. "He had every ship in Battlefleet Sidonia fire a full spread, with plenty of dual-stage cyclonic warheads in the mix. The tomb is _gone_."

"There are others, though." Alberich said. "Emperor alone knows how many. In the end, I'm not even sure if they can be beaten."

Ashalaria smiled. "So then you'd rather lash out blindly until death comes for you, for all of us? Or would you rather fight, fight with a real chance of victory, so that when you finally meet the Dark Lady, you can say you met her on a worthy road?"

Alberich looked up, ideas spreading like wildfire through his mind.

He had work to do.

[x]

Natasha carefully swept her Aurora Accelerator in continuous fire mode across the field in front of her, broiling half a dozen broods of the Gaunts marshaling there. She switched to dispersed repeating fire as she adjusted her aim toward the Warriors riding herd on the more retarded

monsters, then began to carbonize them a hand at a time.

She spotted a large group of Tyrannofexes, at least twenty, sheltering in a hollow in the center of the field. Wrapped in Void Shields and heavy armor, their powerful Rupture Cannons were one of the few weapons that had a serious chance of stopping her.

So she did nothing to them.

However, she did shine a small ultraviolet laser located in her eye assembly at a patch of ground near the center of the group.

Their fate was sealed.

The reflected light of the beam was detected and analysed by her onboard systems. The location of the Tyranids was triangulated, and the location was broadcast to an Imperial aircraft loitering overhead, far to the west. The aircraft relayed the data to a Basilisk battery and the crews sprang into action, putting shells on the way in well under thirty seconds.

The Tyrannofexes were in a state of hibernation, commonly used by the Tyranids to decrease the food consumption of warrior organisms waiting to begin active operations. However, it would take several minutes for them to become fully aware of their surroundings, and by then it would be too late.

Strafing to the side, Natasha couched her Aurora Accelerator, resting the weapon on her right forearm and holding it against the elbow. She reached down with her left hand, drawing an assault cannon from her hip lock. Though her plasma weapon was now only connected to one set of her arm power busses, the stance gave her a large increase in tactical flexibility.

She raised her left assault cannon and pointed it to the side, sending a canister round flying into a charging mob of genestealers. She ignited her Jump Units and began to skate forward, finishing off the genestealers with controlled bursts of Galvanic Cascade fire. As a unit of Haruspices emerged from what she had learned to recognize as a Tyranid organic structure, Natasha unfolded her Mount Pylons and opened fire with her Plasma Impellers, blasting Armor-Piercing High-Explosive into the monsters. They posed a fairly minor threat to her machine, but they were powerful assault units, and murder on infantry.

Natasha sighed as the last of the hideous tongue-monsters was reduced to a pile of gore. Despite the awesome carnage she was engendering, her heart wasn't really in it.

She was, after all, a soldier without a nation.

In essence, her problem stemmed from the fact that the Red Army did not encourage, or tolerate, for that matter, independent though, initiative, and decision-making in its junior officers. She had been raised in a state orphanage, and funneled directly into the military as a TSF pilot based on her aptitude profile. The one constant in her life had been her orders.

And now she had none.

She was alone, with no one to tell her what to do. Captain Michael was her superior under the international agreements that governed units like Windrunner Squad, but he was an _American_. There was no way that the Red Army would want her to follow his lead in a time like this. They would order her to act on her own, to advance the cause of the Soviet Union.

But there was no Soviet Union here, was there?

There was no Motherland to defend. So what was her purpose?

 _Who was she?_

With a growl, she set her PD lasers to autonomic fire, the arrays of volley guns tearing apart the swarms of Gaunts that were trying to close in and attack her legs. As the last of the fiendish midgets was destroyed, the artillery arrived.

The shells burst in the air over the Tyrannofexes, each one releasing over a hundred small explosives. Dresden had been positively gleeful at the idea of the ICM rounds, and he had managed to combine several of his other devices to produce a working model literally overnight.

Within a few seconds, the shape and weighting of the submunitions had caused them to orient themselves downward, to ensure the proper detonation of their explosive payloads. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then a wave of fire seemed to sweep the hollow, Natasha's audio systems relaying a sound like a million firecrackers exploding at once into her cockpit. The dust cleared, revealing the corpses of at least two dozen Tyrannofexes, which appeared to have been hammered with an enormous meat tenderizer.

Changing course radically, Natasha began engaging the groups of Warriors that were maintaining a synapse web over the rallying field, killing them three or five at a time. As she moved, she spotted a cloud of specks some distance away. She zoomed her display on them as she examined the datastreams her sensors feed to her neural interface.

The Tyranid counterattack had arrived. Gargoyles, the winged gaunts that often formed the vanguard of a Tyranid assault, in such numbers that they occluded each other enough that the targeting computer was having trouble counting them accurately.

Natasha locked her assault cannon to her hip, raising Aurora Accelerator with both hands. She pointed it at the center of the Gargoyle swarm and fired a radially-dispersed maximum-intensity blast.

The deluge of radiant blue-green light washed over the monsters, charring dozens down to ash and bone while burning away the wings of dozens more. Natasha frowned as she glanced at the thermal readout from her weapon; the shot had saturated the weapon's heat sinks far more than she liked.

Returning her Aurora Accelerator to her back, Natasha shrugged, holding out her hands. There were probably more efficient ways to go about this, but who really cared?

Impact bars and crash braces extended over her hands, while structural integrity fields flowed through her arms. Bars extended from her wrists, and a shimmering disruption field enveloped her fists.

As the chain-teeth began to whirr, Natasha charged.

The Gargoyles began to throw themselves toward her as she neared the leading edge of the swarm, and Natasha intercepted each of them with her Motorized Blade Powered Fist.

As the first sprays of red splattered across her machine, Natasha decided that the name could use some work.

She continued advancing, striking down one gargoyle after another with precise chain blows, moving in circles to prevent too many from being able to latch onto her at once. She destroyed many of the creatures that came too close with the power blades built into her machine that had taken the place of her edged armor, but she still made most of the kills with her fist.

As a result, she realized that she was forming the center of a massive meat vortex.

It was glorious.

When the swarm ran out of bodies, it took her a moment to notice. Still, her machine seemed fully operational. The idea of a TSF being drenched in enough blood that it started to suffer a loss of capability seemed absurd, but it had actually happened a few times early in the BETA war. A series of repulsion fields activated, pushing the ex-Tyranid off of the skin of her machine in a single sheet.

Spotting no more enemies in the area, Natasha took off in a long jump, engaging her main drive as she lifted off. Retracting her Blade Motors and drawing her Aurora Accelerator, she engaged her infrared sights. Tyranid bio-structures, even those intended to blend in with the landscape, would be noticeable warmer than the surrounding ground.

Natasha set about making that difference much more extreme.

Michael and Melissa were both Americans, and would likely come down on the same side of any significant conflict regardless. Australia was generally aligned with the U.S., so Lily would probably side with them, as was Israel. But Keter was an odd one, so her side would be much less certain.

England and Germany were both in the European coalition that opposed the U.S. in the UN Strategic Council, and given her personality, Cynthia would likely from the nucleus of any opposition to Michael. Sigrid was much more of a wild card. If she stuck with her insane dedication to following orders, she'd charge headlong into hell if Michael suggested he wanted her to. Conversely, if she was more dedicated to her government, she would fight him to the death.

Japan's history with the U.S. was checkered, but it had improved significantly following Operation Ouka. Furthermore, Miharu was likely too passive a person to take any decisive action on her own.

Which meant that Natasha was alone. The Soviet Union had never exactly had many friends, but she had never really felt it personally. It had just been a fact of life. She made jokes, but the Motherland had always been a constant.

She ignited another Tyranid supply depot, massive fat deposits the size of an apartment block, thanking the Glorious People's Communist Party for NBC environmental seals.

What was she going to do?

[x]

"So, are you sure you want to wear your pilot suit?" Tavi asked, glancing away from his display. "Most Fury pilots I know wouldn't let their suits anywhere outside the vault or the cockpit."

"The Fortified suit is intended for all environmental conditions, and its the best armor I have." Michael said. "And the Captain said he wanted to go up in the mountains, and we can't be sure the Tyranids haven't infiltrated them."

He glanced at the back of Tavi's display. "What are you working on?"

"Tyranids in space." Tavi said, switching the display to full-room. "In the vast majority of Fleet Actions against the Tyranids, Navy forces engage the Tyranids in the space near, or in the orbit of, a target world. This places us a serious disadvantage, as the need to defend a fixed point degrades our mobility advantage, while allowing the enemy to leverage their numbers more effectively. Deep space engagement are better, but we rarely have the assets in position to bring the enemy to action far from the system primary."

"So what are you trying to figure out?" Michael asked.

"An improvement." Tavi said. "Something to buy us enough time to marshal the forces we need to stop them."

"What about hitting them between systems?" Michael asked. "They take a while to move interstellar distances, so you would have time to gather forces, and you wouldn't have to worry about defending a planet."

"But even in the Materium, engaging a superluminal target would be impossible. There would be no practical way to see where they actually are; the information couldn't propagate faster than light."

"Couldn't you use the Warp disturbance to track them?" Michael asked.

"Yes, but it wouldn't be fast enough or accurate enough to provide tactical information, or make engagement any more feasible. And the Tyranids only slow down when..." Tavi trailed off. "When they enter the gravity well of a star."

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Michael watched as Tavi manipulated the display.

A moment later, a predatory grin split his face, Tavi mirroring the expression perfectly.

[x]

Dresden sat down in his office, engaged his jamming system, sealed the door, and opened the urgent Astropathic deep link communication awaiting his attention.

While most Astropathic transmissions had a travel time proportional to the distance between sender and receiver, a deep link entanglement device allowed real-time Astropathic communication between itself and a paired opposite.

A holographic image of a Mechanicum two meters tall appeared in the air in front of his desk.

"PASSWORD?" It demanded, in a booming mechanical voice.

"Mad Science means never stopping to ask what's the worst that could happen." Dresden intoned. "Counterphrase?"

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a really big gun."

"Accepted." Dresden said.

The hologram resolved into the image of a young woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties if appearance could be any sort of indicator of age. She had medium hair, pale with a slight metallic blue sheen, like very pale cobalt. Her face had a dignified beauty with a look of kind concern strange to see in priestess of the Adeptus Mechanicus. She wore plain grey robes only mildly darker than her alabaster skin, and appeared to be sitting at a desk.

"Hello, Dresden-senpai." She said, nodding her head. "I hope you are well."

"As well as I ever am." Dresden replied. "I've made a rather interesting discovery, but it's political antimatter. I want to stabilize my position before I put you at risk by telling you more. How is the Tau Empire treating you, Katherine?"

She giggled. "It's so cute. They think their safe with over nine thousand bit encryption, and they network _everything_. I guess they've never met a psionic system cracker."

"I can imagine." Dresden said. "How is your investigation going?"

Katherine's face when grave. "I was right. Completely right."

"What do you mean?" Dresden asked.

"First of all, the Tau have a minimal Warp presence; the strongest of them have less than one percent of the presence of a normal human child. While this prevents them from drawing the attention of malevolent Warp entities, it also makes them more vulnerable to Immaterial attacks."

She shook her head. "But given the large population of many Tau Sept Worlds, combined with the increasing non-Tau demographics of the empire, at least _some_ daemons should manifest and attack. But they never do, and I've been sifting through the Ethereal Caste servers. Even when a story is censored, you can track the suppression efforts and peice together what's going on. But there is _nothing_."

"I... See." Dresden muttered.

"But their technology is the bigger anomaly." She continued. "There is no reason that the weak profile of the Tau should protect their technology from Tech-Daemons. I've been running tests, and while getting my hands on a Riptide was tricky, I can confirm that their technology lacks any significant protection from possession."

Dresden connected the dots, and felt his nutrition processor descent to his pelvis. "So that means something _else_ is protecting them."

"Yes. This plan has been underway for quite some time, so I believe our unknown agent will likely wait for the Tau Empire to complete its Fourth Expansion before moving, at the very least."

Katherine grimaced. "But imagine if every skimmer, drone, and battlesuit in the Tau Sphere was taken by a Daemon over the course of a solar cycle."

"I do believe the current definition of insanity would become somewhat obsolete."

[x]

Michael stepped up next to Captain Horatius.

They were standing on flat shelf of rock, overlooking a number of smaller peaks.

And beyond was the horde.

A crimson giant rendered miniscule by the distance moved among them, fighting and killing amid sparkling flashes of light.

Michael glanced back at the Captain of the Adeptus Astartes, once again bedecked in full battlefield regalia. He was looking out at the plain below with an intent expression, the glow in his eyes clearly visible.

"If you don't mind me asking," Michael said, after a moment, "Why did you ask me to walk up here with you?"

"I prefer go into battle alongside men I know." Captain Horatius said. "Those who lead others in particular."

"I am hardly the only person here who meets that criteria." Michael said.

"Yes. But a single Titan can turn the tide of a battle, and you command eight." Horatius replied, looking at Michael.

He tilted his head to the side. "You aren't from around here, are you?"

Michael shook his head.

The Captain smiled. "I suppose you are farther from home than any other living thing on this planet.

"Yes."

The both looked back out across the plain, toward the colossus fighting in the distance.

"She wants to trust you, you know." Horatius said.

"I suppose." Michael said. "Though... Are you a psyker?"

"Yes." Horatius said. "Though I never really got along with the rest of the Librarium. After the decade I spent on Mars..."

He shrugged. "It was probably for the best, in the end. It afforded me a rather unique perspective and breadth of knowledge, which has proved quite useful on the battlefield."

Horatius looked up at the sky, already beginning to fade to black. "Tell me, what would your fellow pilots say is your greatest triumph?"

"I doubt I've achieved anything worthy of that name."

"That is a common sentiment." Horatius said. "But not the question. I asked what _others_ would say."

"Rovaniemi Hive." Michael said softly. "It was a nightmare, but when it was all said and done, someone had decided I was the hero of the day. I was told my actions had saved the expeditionary force, turned the campaign from a disaster into a coup. That I had done something over than trick men I had no authority to command into following me on an arrogant jaunt into the underworld."

Horatius frowned.

"All I really knew was I was the last person there worthy of The Medal."

"So what happened?" The Captain asked softly. "What was the purpose of the battle?"

Michael opened a map of Europe on his Datapad, marking it to show a rough outline of the strategic situation the day Operation Einherjar. Horatius frowned for a moment as he saw it, then nodded.

"Rovaniemi Hive was situated here, in the northernmost section of Scandinavia, where it connects to the Eurasian Mainland. It was a massive underground complex that gave our enemies, the BETA, effective control of the rest of the region. They could use the Baltic Sea to cover the movement of strike forces to anywhere on the peninsula and cut off an invading force, and the harsh climate made it impractical to garrison an occupation force large enough to prevent that. But as long as the BETA held Scandinavia, they tied down most of a Field Army to defend the British Isles, which were our last significant stronghold in the theater."

Horatius nodded.

"The decision was made to subjugate Rovaniemi and allow the liberation of Scandinavia." Michael said. "It was a good call, but the execution was flawed. The coalition opposing the use of G-Bombs had gained considerable influence after Operation Ouka, and convinced a lot of politicians, and politicians masquerading as generals, that reducing a Hive with purely conventional weapons. So the Fourth Army VI and VIII Corps received the call; take Rovaniemi. No strategic weapons. That was about when things started going wrong."

Michael shook his head. "I was with the VIII Corps, which was a U.S. formation. VI was U.N./International. The plurality of VI was European, as was the leadership, and the rest was a grab-bag. We landed on time, but VI Corps delayed for more than a day, apparently due to ice conditions."

He zoomed in on the beach, highlighting the two landing zones in relation to the enemy Hive. "They hit us, but we had a solid position and the Navy wore down the BETA fairly effectively before they engaged our ground forces, and we piled them up with minimal casualties. Then VI Corps started their landings."

"The officers of VI Corps were overseeing a multinational unit, so they had been selected for caution, so as to avoid a diplomatic 'incident'. They delayed their landing, and the cynical side of me says they did it so that we'd soak up the casualties required to establish the beachhead. But that didn't work out for them. By the time they started landing, the BETA had lined their LZ with Laser-class organisms. They took heavy fire on the approach, and the Navy hadn't wanted to risk any capital ships to the polar ice, so we didn't have anything heavier than a cruiser. One of the destroyer groups, Taffy-3, went above and beyond. They came in and laid down direct fire on the shoreline with white phosphorus/magnesium rounds, blinding the Laser-class and making up for the wind conditions rendering normal AM munitions nonfunctional."

"We counterattack and VI Corps was eventually able to land, but by that point, the BETA were boiling out of the Hive, and we were in complete disarray. I had lost contact with my two immediate superiors, and eventually wound up near a supply dump. See, we'd been having a problem with the environmental seals, letting subzero air into the cockpits. The Fortified Suits froze thoroughly from the inside out, and along with the combat stims, a lot of pilots didn't realize there was a problem until they were disabled by hypothermia. So we had dozens of TSFs with no one to pilot them."

Michael smiled darkly, shaking his head. "So then I get a positively brilliant idea. I slave the autopilot controls of the TSFs to mine, which I most certainly did not have the legal authority to do, stole a railgun, and some other odds and ends. I'm not sure why they weren't already being used on the field, but so much had gone wrong already that I didn't think much of it. Then I rounded up six other pilots, bringing my unit up to seven men more than I had been assigned, distributed the slaved units, and we moved out."

Michael took a deep breath. "Toward the heart of the enemy Hive."

He zoomed in on the terrain, marking a series of points in bright red. "Charles, Erwin, and Cecilia died getting us to the base of the Hive Monument. It should have been impossible, but Aria was piloting an A-10 Warthog Tactical Surface Attacker, and most of the Destroyer-Class in the area were facing the main army. Aria made short work of the lighter enemies, and my railgun was more than enough for the few heavies we ran into."

"When we got to the base of the Monument, I found a spot where the launch shaft was close to the exterior, and used the railgun to blast out holes to place S-11 charges. Patrick died covering me while I planted the charges, and Aria ran out of ammo for her main guns just before I finished setting up the fans. The surviving Tank-class started dragging her down, but she overloaded her reactor and took them with her."

Michael looked upward and closed his eyes for a moment. "Enough of the pack-mule slaved units had survived for the plan to work, and turning back would have been impossible. Aria had bought us a respite from combat, so Henry and I went to work. We had brought a few of the heavy air handlers used to pump air into the heating units for the prefab buildings, and we hooked the intakes up to tanks of turbine generator vapor fuel. It's stored as a liquid, but it evaporates at room temperature. The vapor is toxic enough to be dangerous, but while the BETA can ignore that, its rapid, highly exothermic combustion reactor is a different matter. Patrick had found some liquid oxygen, I don't know where, so we added that too."

He sighed. "We were almost ready to go when I registered a seismic contact. A Fort-class, approaching through the blizzard. Henry just opened a comm window and said ' _England expects that every man will do his duty'_ , then drew his greatsword and disappeared into the storm. Eventually, they found him eight miles away, at the end of a trail of Fort corpses."

"That bought me the time I needed to finish pumping in the gases, so I ordered every slaved mule I had left into the hole in the monument and sent them jumping into the main shaft. They used cold-gas charges to empty out their transport compartments, and the Laser-class lit them up as soon as they cleared the gas cloud."

Michael's lips moved into a forlorn smile. "Of course, given that several hundred tons of high-energy nanoparticulate thermite had just been scattered into oxygen-rich air saturated with vapor fuel, that move was... unhealthy."

Horatius' eyes widened, and he began to grin. "So then, you..."

"Turned the Hive into the largest fuel-air bomb ever detonated." Michael said. "I've checked the records. If I'd been exposed on the surface, I would have suffocated, had I survived the heat long enough to do so. Even airborne, my TSF was disabled, and I was knocked out, either by the pressure wave or the landing. On the plus side, the shock front of superheated air made a mess of the BETA in the Hive tunnels, and the loss of the Hive Reactor Core broke down their local tactical coordination."

Michael chuckled. It also caused a political shitstorm. When the satellites picked up the flash and the thermal bloom, almost everyone decided that it was _clearly_ an atomic bomb. Several countries were so eager to start ranting that they forgot to notice the complete absence of a nuclear double-pulse in the flash. The seismic analysis confirmed a total kiloton yield in the low twenties, so it wasn't until a survey team was able to confirm the complete lack of fission fragments or irradiated materials that the outroar died down. Coincidently, they also found me."

"Once set, there are few things short of an act of God can change a pilot's callsign. By the time I woke up, I had already been renamed Trinity. I only managed to get Windrunner squad to stop using it and shut up about the whole affair a couple of weeks ago." He shook his head. "The PR people wanted me to go into recruiting. Treasury wanted me to sell war bonds. The Space Corps offered me a position teaching advanced gunnery. But I couldn't take any of that. I'd just come up with some gimmick and convinced six people to die to make it work. That isn't heroism."

"Heroism can be difficult to define, so I will not contest that point for the moment." Captain Horatius said. "But by any decent moral standard or system of values, your actions were morally correct and upstanding ones of the highest caliber. The Imperial Creed would consider you actions to defend mankind to be exemplary. In consequentialist terms, your companion's sacrifices purchased the survival of other at a rate of more than ten thousand to one, and removed a considerable threat to many more, so you would be vindicated."

"And those who accompanied you did so of their own free will. They had the same duty, and they swore the same oaths, and they chose, as independent beings, that following you offered the best chance to fulfill those duties. They did so knowing full well the immense danger of the plan, and accepted it." Horatius shook his head. "So, are you arrogant enough to deny them that nobility?"

Michael closed his eyes, lowering his head, though he remained silent.

"These are not problems that others can solve for you." Horatius said. "But I don't believe you understand the full scope of the outcomes of your actions."

He raised his hand and placed it on Michael's head.

 _Michael was underwater. It was dark and bitterly cold, he knew, but he could see perfectly and felt nothing. In front of him, an arrowhead of eight teardrop-shaped craft, each mounting four long, rear-swept fins in an 'X' pattern, glided through the water._

" _This is Kraken 11 to base." A voice Michael knew came from the lead craft said. "We have the herd in sight and are preparing to attack. Just another day in paradise, over."_

 _Long streams of bubbles began lancing down from each submersible. It wasn't until Michael spotted the first blood-red bloom in the water far below that he realized what was happened._

 _A cacophony of strangely distant pops reach him as the submarines, Kraken Squad, rained death on the BETA below._

 _The world shifted, and now he was standing over a long line of concrete bunkers and interlocking trenches. Countless weapons of all calibers were sending a hellstorm of fire downrange, toward and approaching horde of BETA organisms numerous beyond belief._

 _For a moment, it seemed hopeless, but then a dozen streaks of fire reached out into the horde. Michael recognized them as railgun ionization trails, and followed them back to Raptors, each one standing atop the earthworks and holding one of those potent weapons, shattering the Destroyers and leaving the other BETA to fall victim to lesser weapons._

 _Another shift. "Today, the St. Petersburg defensive line repelled a BETA offensive, inflicting heavy casualties... With the Baltic and Rovaniemi defense lines now reaching full operational status, settlement along the Atlantic Coast has begun._

 _The shifts accelerated. A building grew from a foundation, to a frame, to the center of a growing town as if in time-lapse._

 _Two children ran thought a dusting of snow, chasing one another beneath the watchful gaze of a marble statue, an F-22 Raptor in miniature, standing in a combat stance with rifles at the ready and wreathed in scintillating orange-and-red crystalline fire._

 _A family sat around a blazing hearth, its garland hanging from its lintel and with an ornamented pine filling one corner. Someone said something, and all present burst into laughter._

 _A man looked down at photograph of his brothers-in-arms, then up at the half-shattered Hive monument before him, now preserved just as it was at the end of the battle, now a true Memorial. Then he looked at the woman standing next to him and muttered a quiet prayer of thanks and he reached into his pocket and withdrew a small black velvet box and went down on his knee. He'd faced horrors from beyond this earth once before here, after all; it would be an insult to lose courage now._

 _The shifts accelerated. Birth and death, love and hate, joy and tragedy, all the million ugly, beautiful facets of life._

 _Of Humanity._

 _Of people who might otherwise never have had that chance to live._

Michael stumbled backwards, head spinning.

"I hope you can find peace with your actions." Horatius said. "But we have come back to that day, and once again hear the clarion call. I would be honored to fight alongside you."

Michael raised his hand into a salute. "Yes, sir."

 **X**

 **"To every man upon this earth**

 **Death cometh soon or late.**

 **And how can man die better**

 **Than facing fearful odds,**

 **For the ashes of his fathers,**

 **And the temples of his Gods."**


	7. 05: Our Time Left Isn't Zero

Princeps-Colonel Michael Black sat in the command throne of his Tactical Surface Fighter, his nervous system synced to the command systems of the Titan. He stepped forward, _feeling_ the motion to an extent he was yet to become fully accustomed to.

He, along with the rest of Windrunner Squadron, was standing in the forward starboard launch bay of the _Temporum Martis_ , the Strike Cruiser of the 5th Company-Errant of the Seraphim Radiant. It was a cavernous space, tall enough for his Titan to stand upright, filled nearly to the brim with the final stages of preparation for the impending planetary assault. Technicians in void-suits ran down the pre-flight checklists and diagnostic rituals for Atherlights and Thunderhawks, while heavy servitors disconnected fuel lines and power cables and stowed them under the watchful eye of the flight-Enginseers.

Michael looked at the other seven members of Windrunner Squadron. They were fine soldiers one and all, and after watching them rise to the occasion of the past week, he had never been more certain that they deserved a better leader.

But the perfect can be the enemy of the good, and he was what they had.

He just needed to keep telling himself that.

He took a deep breath and opened the squad communication channel.

"Momentarily, we will be commencing an Orbital Drop Operation. You all know the plan and you all know how to do your jobs, so execute to perfection. This mission demands nothing less." Michael looked up, at the unique machines of his companions, each a unique and beautiful angel of war. "We can't be certain of communication conditions, so fight independently, but be careful. Our machines are a major portion of the plan to reduce the Hive and neutralize the Norn Queen. Princeps-Captain Melissa Black holds the only Drop Qualification among us, so she will be acting as Dive Marshal. Unless I countermand her, follow her orders until we touch down. Understood."

Melissa chorused the affirmative with the rest of the squad as she looked at the resplendent silver-and-red armor of her... Her Commanding Officer. She might have thought of him as a sibling, and she might wish him to me much more, but she could be a Lady some other time.

Now, she needed to be a soldier.

"We will be exiting the ship under internal power, and docking with the Landing Sleds and Reentry Shells externally." Melissa began, thinking back to all the days she'd laid awake in microgravity, wondering why she'd signed up for Drop School. "This will be a two-step process. First, we will board the sled, then use its thrusters to enter the shell. The shells will seal behind us, and they won't open until the disassembly charges fire or you get zapped. Trajectory and commands are pre-programed and so heavily redundant that if you need to take manual control, don't bother, you're about to undergo ram compression ionization. Focus on staying conscious, get ready to take control when the warning light comes on, and try not to think about the nine percent failure rate."

Cynthia Elswood looked down at the picture on the dataslate in her hand.

"Understood." She muttered. "All systems nominal."

She had read up on everything she could find on Drop Operations, but she wasn't sure how much it mattered.

All the training in the world hadn't saved Simon Elswood from dying in the ruins of France, pulled down by the BETA because so many of the delusional politicians and the moronic General Officers who licked their boots were afraid to make use of the G-Bomb. Yes, it could be deadly, but when you face an enemy that threatens you with annihilation, you do _anything_ it takes to destroy them first, because if you fail, the consequences of any action you might take are utterly irrelevant.

For better or worse, the Imperium seemed to understand that.

"Move into launch formation." Melissa ordered, running a final diagnostic as she walked toward the rippling curtain of energy holding void at bay.

Michael ran a final system check. A moment later, everything came back positive, and he joined Melissa next to the energy curtain, looking out at the planet below.

Somewhere, thousands of miles away, battle already raged. All of the passes under siege had begun limited diversionary offensives, staying within the cover of their artillery while, in theory, still forcing the Tyranids to moving their reserves forward. That would have begun half an hour ago. Thousands would have already given everything for a hope of victory.

"I am prepared for combat, commander."

Michael glanced at the private communications window Sigrid had opened. She appeared to be staring at him intently.

"Thank you, Sigrid." Michael said. "I'm sorry that I had to drag you into this."

"That is unnecessary." She said. "I am a Brynhildr. What I am ordered to attain is my sole desire."

Michael was mildly disturbed by that, but at this point, it was something that would have to wait for another time.

"Do your best to stay alive down there." He said, finally settling on a response. "I can't afford to lose you."

There was a short pause. "Yes, sir."

The channel cut out.

A series of lights on his displays began to blink as Melissa began the countdown. "T-minus thirty seconds to drop. Stand ready."

Michael began muttering a short prayer under his breath. Given what he was about to do, it seemed prudent.

"T-minus ten seconds." Melissa said. "Confirm navigational data. T-minus eight seconds. Confirm environmental seals."

All of the checks on the board in front of Michael's farce, his own and abbreviated readouts from the whole squad, were green. An eternity seemed to pass as Melissa finished the countdown.

"The light is on!" She shouted. "Go! Go! Go!"

Michael charged forward next to Melissa, jumping just before he hit the atmosphere curtain and assuming a superman flight stance, once again thankful for the artificial gravity his cockpit had acquired.

Cynthia and Natasha jump a moment later, slightly further apart than Michael and Melissa. Keter and Miharu follow suit, then Lily and Sigrid, the last pair jumping from opposite sides of the hanger.

Michael floated through space as the three-dimensional positions of his squad appeared in his mind. Melissa sent an automatic command, and thrusters fired on all eight Titans, widening their arrowhead formation.

They floated on an inertial cruiser as they closed on their Landing Sleds, which had mimicked the squad's formation.

The sleds really did bear some resemblance to their namesake, particularly if you were the sort of person who could actually see constellations. They had a boomerang-shaped frontal section, longer than any of Windrunner's machines were tall. Two bladelike structures extended back from the fore section, the gap between them wide enough to comfortably fit a TSF. Dozens of armatures, macromechadendrites, and sub-arms posed around that gap formed the docking system.

Michael fired a braking thrust, almost exactly matching velocity with the sled. He could feel the slight vibrations moving through his machine as his onboard computer took control of the sled and initiated the docking procedure.

As the process of synchronizing his Void Shields with the weaker but much more numerous shield generators in the sled, Melissa spoke again.

"Advance to contact with Re-Entry Shell when ready."

Taking a deep breath, Michael closed his eyes as he fired the thrusters on this landing sled. Neural control was the key factor here, and where he would succeed or fail. He could give his eyes a rest.

The squad arrived at the Reentry Shells just over a minute later. Each one was a massive seventy-meter-long cone of dull white ceramite with a black diamantine tip. Frankly, the visual appearance of the shells was rather dull, and their inner workings were simplistic compared to the other artifacts of technology on display.

Using his gyroscopes to set his craft into an axial roll, then stop it a moment later to ensure he lined up properly with the rectangular boarding hatch on the shell, steadfastly trying not to think about anyone currently within a mile of his position.

He came to a jarring stop, then felt two distinct vibrations, one from his suit docking and the other from the entry hatch sealing behind him.

Then they stopped, and there was a moment of quintessential stillness. Michael had a moment to notice a hint of melancholy lurking behind his bulwark of stoicism.

"Commence reentry." Melissa said.

Thrusters on the conic surfaces of the shells flared, slightly reducing the velocity of each of the assemblies. It was a small change, but it was enough that each shell was no longer traveling over the surface of the planet fast enough for that surface to drop away at the same speed they were pulled toward it.

In its final form, The Plan began with a rather uncommon move; a Titan Drop Operation, in this case onto the Tyranid Main Hive. This was dependent on using the _Temporum Martis_ as a staging point to allow the drop to contain enough decoys that Windrunner Squad would, in theory, suffer no more than one tenth of one member lost.

However, in order to keep the Strike Cruiser out of sight of the Tyranids, it had to stay in a fairly low orbit, well below that normally used for an orbital assault. But as orbital velocity was inversely proportional to the radius of a given orbit, the _Temporum Martis_ , and Windrunner Squad, was moving too quickly to assault the Hive directly. Some of that kinetic had to go somewhere, and the atmosphere _was_ just sitting there...

As the Reentry Shells dropped, ethereal flames began to flicker across their leading surface, insanely hot for all their nebulous appearance.

[x]

Kantor Chaderton stood on the small deck of his family had-unit, looking up at the stars. He knew there were enemies on the planet, but they were far away, and he was too young to understand the hushed conversations and worried looks of the adults around him.

At his age, the world was still wonderful.

As he watched, something flickered in a corner of the sky, and lights began to appear, eight of them, moving across the sky like a flock of exogeese.

"Emmie!" He shouted, not looking away.

"What is it?" His sister, a big over a year over than he was, dashed out onto the deck. "What?"

He pointed. "Shooting stars!"

Emmie looked up, eyes widening. She bowed her head, making the Sign of the Aquila over her breast.

"I wish big brother comes home soon," she whispered, "Safe and sound."

[x]

"Confirmation code verified as ETERNAL BLAZING GOLD," Assistant Missileer Boreas said firmly, "Final verification complete."

"We have received a valid Activation Order, Target Order, Firing Order, and Confirmation Order." Chief Missileer Aeorum replied. "We have a complete Emergency Action Dispatch."

"I suppose we should get on that, then." Boreas said, tapping in a combination on from the firing order into the runepad of a small safe with his right hand, his left being firmly pressed against a biometric verification augur.

The two men were sitting in a small, cramped room, facing massive displays of almost unique equipment. This room was located near the heart of an even stranger spacecraft, which was currently several meters underwater in an isolated mountain lake.

The vessel was based on a standard landing ship, this model almost two hundred meters long with the elongated teardrop shape common for such vessels. However, the outside was featureless cam-plate, currently colored a dull grey, with two rows of twelve large hatches on the top.

Inside the control capsules, the Missileers each removed a key from their respective safes, then leaned in opposite directions to insert them in keyholes located at opposite ends of the capsule. The chief missileer began counting down from three, and on zero, two keys turned.

Outside the ship, the hatches blew open one by one as fifteen-meter bullet-shaped canisters blasted out of their hatches. Moments after leaving the water, pyrotechnic fasteners detonated, splitting the canister in half to reveal the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile sheltered inside.

The plasma drive on the missile activated and it began its long one-way journey, moving clear just in time for the next tube in sequence. It took less than ninety seconds for all twenty-four Everstorm ICBMs, each carrying a warhead an order of magnitude more powerful than that of a deathstrike missile, to launch, by which time the first missile to fire had already vanished from sight. Elsewhere, two other similar ships launched their payloads moments later. The three flocks of missiles began to communicate, adjusting their speeds to coordinate their attacks.

[x]

"Prepare to release shields." Melissa said.

"Affirmative." Lily said, arming the release mechanism. "Ready for drop."

"We'll be crossing the pole momentarily." Melissa said. "We can expect come under ground fire as soon as that happens."

"Understood." Lily said. "Uh... Do we have a plan for that or something?"

"Wait for it." Melissa said. "Should be about now."

A formation of several dozen macrocannon shells shot past the Reentry Shells.

"Supporting fire from the _Temporum Martis_." Cynthia said. "It should help."

"Opening shells in ten seconds." Melissa said.

Lily took a deep breath, the double checked the status on her inertial compensators. She told herself that this would be nothing like Sumatra. She was landing with a skilled formation, eight professionals synchronized with the most advanced war machines she'd ever seen. They had a solid plan, an amazing leader, and a battleship five kilometers long backing them up.

The charges detonated. The conic hull of the Reentry Shell split into sixteen sections, all of which were thrown clear by their explosive bolts. A cloud of mechanical debris followed as the shell shed its inner workings.

What remained was Lily's Titan in its Landing Sled, surrounded by a square of four decoys. Another five decoys in the same formation were mounted directly ahead of her, and a tenth decoy was at head of the assembly. Thrusters fired, and Lily took up position in formation with the decoys. The rest of her squad did likewise.

Then they fired a deceleration burn, and eighty-eight spacecraft began to descend.

[x]

"Detecting enemy missile launches!" Lily said. "Twenty, sixty... thermal blooms are merging."

The missiles fired from around the Hive were ultra-long-range interceptors, each one a fusion of more than two dozen separate organisms. Among their major components were a series of fuel bladders, a bioplasma engine a tracking brain, and five plasma/haywire terminal impact vehicles.

"I'm getting a better sensor picture." Lily continued. "Looks like... four hundred and thirty-nine missiles. I'm... not entirely confident about our chances."

"I find your lack of faith... Disturbing." Michael said, shaking his head, then looking down at the Hive. "I have you now."

A thin cone of explosives at the core of each of the shells fired by the _Temporum Martis_ detonated, sending several hundred thousand gravsteel ball bearings blasting out from each of them and forming a cloud of metal across the sky. Moments later, the flock of Tyranid missiles entered the cloud.

The missiles were protected by a shell of hard chitin, but that was intended to protect them from collisions with dust or micrometeorites. The missiles were moving at several times the speed of sound, and the bearings were descending at hypersonic orbital velocities.

Ergo, the results of the collision were... messy. More than a few of the missiles survived the impacts, but they fell victim to the cloud of plasma created by the demise of their brethren.

Windrunner squad continued to descend. For a hundred seconds, nothing happened.

When the tone of the Laser Alarm sounded in his cockpit, Michael almost felt nostalgic. Sure, there had been more than a few problems back home: Heavy Laser-class BETA would vaporize you in a single hit... And Destroyers were almost unkillable from their front arc... And the Tank-class would _crawl into your nightmares and devour your soul_...

He shook his head. This galaxy had horrors far beyond anything he would have thought possible back home, but by the same token he was also capable of wielding power on a similarly impossible scale. He could fight, now. And in a world this awful, he doubted anyone would mistake him for a hero.

A laser blast splashed across his Void Shield. It depleted several layers of shielding projected by his Landing Sled, but didn't even touch the shield of his Titan. One of the decoys, essentially an empty landing sled with a dummy Titan, was less lucky.

As the eighty-seven craft began moving in a quasi-random interlocking evasive pattern, Michael surveyed the ground defenses. They were formidable. Four dozen major laser batteries, twice as many Dactylis platforms armed with Macro Venom Cannons, and countless Exocrines and Tyrannofexes emerging from the tunnel complexes.

The ground fire intensified as they descended. Michael's Void Shields were steadily eroded, and three decoys were destroyed in quick succession by first salvo of the Venom Cannons.

Decoys continued to be lost at a steady rate, and Michael was starting to worry that...

The ground fire abruptly stopped.

"Multiple contacts descending rapidly from high orbit." Lily said. "Enemy batteries are engaging. Losing contacts quickly, targets are-."

Lily's eyes widened. "Thermal flash. Atomic double-pulse confirmed. Fifty-seven detonation sources confirmed. Shockwave is propagating... That was, ah, a pretty big explosion. I can't see the Hive site through the cloud yet..."

All across the peninsula hosting the Hive Complex, plasma warheads detonated, turning the world to fire. The falling warheads were widely scattered over a large area, but the target area was equally large. A few were completely off target; one pair misled by four hundred miles, detonating underwater and annihilating the last school of a species of feeder fish that had otherwise been wiped out by the Tyranid Ripper Eels.

But these were thermonuclear weapons. 'Fairly close' was more than good enough.

She frowned. "You know, if we came all this way just to watch the Hive get nuked with bombs they had the whole time..."

"Our presence was the sole reason the warheads were able to penetrate." Cynthia said. "Had the enemy still possessed their long-range interceptors, or not have focused their fire on us for most of the missiles' flight, at most a handful of them would have survived to detonation. In any case, I, for one, would be glad if no further lives needed to be placed at risk today."

"Let's stay focused, people." Melissa said. "They'll be launching Harpies soon. Once we can confirm that, the plan is to wait fifty seconds, then open the Landing Sleds. We're low enough to get by without them now, and we'll want to be weapons free to engage the uglies. After the sleds open, the aerospace stage of the operation will be over, and operational authority will return to the mission commander. Stand by."

"I'm getting a read on the main Hive structure." Lily said. "It's still there, but it looks like it's suffered heavy damage. Significant ablative armor on all surfaces, and several regions show signs of impulse shock. Overall, it's damaged but still kicking."

Michael watched the ground conditions as they waited. A steady wind was blowing in from the ocean and rapidly cooling the air superheated by the plasma warheads, though it was also feeding the massive fires that had previously been dozens of square miles of nightmarish Tyranid biological infrastructure.

Much of the ground had been covered by a photosynthetic membrane, a sort of massive ground-covering leaf made of meat. That had burned away almost instantly, but the sites of former reclamation pools and spawning pits resembled gates to hell.

Eventually, sections of fused tissue on the side of the Hive structure blasted outward, re-opened the tunnels to the Harpy Rookeries inside. Michael watched threat symbols appear as the monsters threw themselves out of the tunnels and into the air.

They were exiting rather quickly, and as it continued, Michael realized that there were quite a few of them.

"Opening in ten seconds." Melissa said. "Good hunting."

The Landing Sled split in two with a jolt. Michael felt his Titan begin to shake, buffeted by the wind. He activated his stabilizers and swung into a 'standing' position, spine perpendicular to the ground. Then he pushed a button.

Around him, his squadmates did likewise. The decoys also opened and released their payloads; missile containers. Each of the fifty-three surviving decoys carried a pod of seven missiles, and as Michael triggered the launch sequence, they all fired at once.

These weapons lacked the devastating plasma warheads of the ICBMs, but they had a CEP three orders of magnitude smaller, as well as deadly two-meter dimantine/osmium penetrator heads.

The missiles spread out as they descended, passing through the ascending formation of Harpies and Hive Crones just below the cloud layer. They struck moments later.

Though the Hive complex was heavily armored and warded by the psychic might of the Hive Mind, both defensive measures were currently experiencing technical difficulties, a problem not uncommon among organisms recently in close proximity to multiple thermonuclear detonations.

As a result, when the missiles struck, the results were rather anticlimactic. True, each one produced a gout of liquefied organic material, but the Hive was a sprawling complex, kilometers tall in places, and the overall effect was miniscule.

The reason for this was simple. First, the missiles had penetrated far deeper than their effective blast radius; with the chitin compromised by stellar heat, most detonated more than a hundred meters from the surface. In most cases, the immense heat of the missile's plasma engines had seared the entry wound shut, precluding an external display.

Secondly, the explosive payload of the missiles was not their primary _raison d'etre_. It was simply present to aid in the dispersion of the crystallized mutagenic acid surrounding them, shaped to cast fragments of poison in the missile's direction of travel.

"I'm reading an increase in neural activity in the Hive." Lily announced. "Also, the enemy aerial units are still approaching, so..."

"We'll eliminate them." Michael said calmly. "Lily, you know the plan. Everyone else: purge the sky."

Michael's mount pylons unfolded, the rest of his squad assuming similar firing positions. Lily was the exception; her green-and-black Titan assumed a prone position, jump units aimed downwards, with lines of light tracing across the unique long rifle in her hand as she prepared to fire.

"Now."

Twenty-four galvanic cascades opened fire at once, filling the air with streams of silver lightning. Though the swarm rising toward Windrunner Squad was immense, that was the only advantage they had.

First, they were fighting up the gravity gauge; the Tyranid projectiles would fall away from their targets, losing energy where those of their enemies gained it. Second, their weapons were positioned wrong to effectively target a distant overhead opponent, rendering their return fire sporadic and largely ineffective.

Finally, they were all dying.

In order to ready them for launch and minimize their ascent time, the Norn Queen in the Hive had administered a potent cocktail of stimulants and psychotropics to its fliers. Each of their primary and secondary hearts was beating at more than twice its normal combat rate, and their brains were literally breaking down as the Hive Mind channeled every iota of psychic energy it could into the telekinetic propulsion assistance organs that allowed the Harpies to meet mechanical aircraft on even terms. Were the battle to end immediately, the combination of the two effects meant not one of the organisms would live until sunset.

Also, the sudden redistribution of psionic power came as a rather massive shock to more than a few Zoanthropes currently engaging another Guard formation two sectors over, but that's another story.

In any case, when then the hail of metal fell onto the swarm, it wasn't particularly accurate. But then, it didn't have to be. With their overworked circulatory systems, a single hit to the body of a Hive Crone would cause it to lose enough ichor to be unfit to continue the mad climb. But in the grasp of the indomitable single-minded determination of the Hive Mind, the beasts paid no heed to their injuries and in turn each suffered the inevitable consequences.

While the rest of the squad was destroying a significant portion of the Tyranid air assets on the planet, Lily had a different task. Every ten seconds or so, she fired a single shot from her rifle.

Each of the projectiles was similar to the discarding-sabot penetrator used by the the main guns of some tanks in the BETA War, but these were significantly longer relative to their diameter, and moving _far_ faster.

Lily fired each of her hyperpenetration rounds at a hotspot of bioelectric activity in the Hive complex. The Norn Queen possessed absolute control over her spawnlings as the embodiment of the Hive Mind, and thought she possessed immense cognitive and psionic abilities, there was still a limit to her ability to process data.

Therefore, once an infestation was well established, the Queen commanding the operation, or Dominatrix if no Norn was present, would establish a series of neural network processors in a psychically-linked parallel distributed processing system. This would give her the capacity she needed to process the data feed to her by a hundred thousand Synapse creatures and command ten million warriors with a single intellect.

It was fairly important. So she poked it. With bullets.

With each node destroyed, the Norn Queen would have to choose between losing some psychic power, sacrificing some control over her creatures, or weakening the defenses of the Hive. Whatever she chose, it would benefit them.

An observer watching from below the clouds would have been treated to an interesting display. First the silver streaks of fire descending from the heavens, scattered across more than a hundred miles by the distance of their flight.

The bodies would come next.

First would be the Harpies and Hive Crones that had lost one or both wings, allowing them to fall much more aerodynamically, reach a higher terminal velocity, and splash into the ocean north of the Hive complex sooner.

Next, the fliers that had been disabled by body hits fell, their intact wings slowing their fall. After that was the mist of blood, the high surface/weight ratio of the droplets causing them to drift downward like the body of a heretic suspended on a column of autogun fire.

Finally, the soldiers of Humanity descended, and for a single long moment, they truly did for all the worlds resemble heavenly Seraphim as they stepped down onto the plain of ash.

[x]

The world vanished and reappeared in an insane flash of light as Captain-Errant Horatius and his honor guard teleported to the battlefield. He'd always been good with teleportation, and guiding himself and six others down from the Strike Cruiser's teleportarium was about as easy as anything Warp-related could ever be.

Horatius took in his surroundings, his autosense expanding outward as he readied his weapons. He'd been right on target; in perfect position to support the Titans already engaged.

As his honor guard spread out, the first of the Drop Pods touched down. They struck with incredible force, but the Artificer Tartaros-Pattern Tactical Dreadnought Armor he and his guards wore absorbed the shockwaves easily.

Space Marines in the scarlet-trimmed silver armor of the Seraphim Radiant began to deploy out of some, but not all, of the pods. The others folded outward to reveal heavy artillery pieces; Earthshaker or Medusa heavy guns and quad-mounted Icarus AA Laser Arrays.

The Marines began to form up in dispersed combat formation as Horatius advanced towards his position on the line. The XIII Corps would be landing troops soon, and they didn't have the luxury of Drop Pods to avoid ground fire, or Power Armor to protect them while they disembarked.

So the Adeptus Astartes would secure a landing zone.

A Carnifex rounded a hill a short distance away, with two identical abominations close on its heels. Each one had a pair of biocannons and a pair of psychic claws, and all appeared rather angry.

"Engaging." Horatius muttered, his armor systems carrying his voice onto the Company Tactical Network as he charged. "Three heavy."

The Carnifexes turned toward him, Captain Horatius drawing his sword as they did so.

Fragarach. Its burnished silver surface seemed to shimmer for a moment as the psycho-technological power of the relic activated, surrounding the blade in nearly-invisible eddies of gravity.

The Tyranids opened fire. Horatius caught one biocannon round on his shield and evaded the rest, lightning arcing out across the surface of the shield as the force of the attack dissipated. He smiled.

Compared to everything else, combat was simple. It was by no means easy, physically or intellectually, but it was simple.

Defeat the enemy. The rest was details.

Horatius sprang into the air more than a dozen yards from the lead Carnifex, pushing psychic power into his blade. He fell towards the creature at an angle which its claws, intended for scything down infantry, could reach only with difficulty, and struck.

Fragarach seemed to hesitate for a sliver of an instant as it touched the carapace on the monster's neck. Then its gravitational vortices gained hold and became violent, shredding armor and tissue as he swung his blade downward in a torrent of psionic force.

The Carnifex died in an instant, its entire nervous system becoming one massive aneurysm. The engineered monsters were powerful, and even without direct control, utterly relentless. However, their minds were weak on their own, and he'd killed the beast too quickly for the Hive Mind to surge psychic energy to defend it.

Horatius kicked off the dying monster to avoid the biocannon fire of one of its brood-mates. As he did so, a limb of his servo-harness unfolded, the fusion caster mounted on its tip glowing as it reached firing position.

The weapon could function as either a dispersed flamer equivalent or a focused melta-type weapon; in this case, he chose the latter. A red-white ray of liquid fire lanced out and struck the flank of the more distant Carnifex.

As the beast recoiled, Horatius moved to gain cover behind the closer monster. It would only take the one he'd shot a few seconds to recover and move to gain a firing angle on him, but he didn't need nearly that long.

He didn't even imbue his weapon with psychic force this time; this Carnifex was a fairly standard model, so all of its size-appropriate guts were in the usual places.

Fragarach ripped and tore its guts.

The last Carnifex, wounded and alone, never really stood a chance.

[x]

Miharu waited. She had, as of yet, done little to participate in the battle. It was largely a matter of specialization. Natasha or Michael-senpai could burn hordes to ash, and Sigrid could hold the sky.

But Miharu could kill giant monsters.

That was problem. Most of the large Tyranid monsters had been destroyed by the ICBM strike or missile attacks that followed, and Melissa had cleaned up the survivors without difficulty. Therefore, the Captain had ordered her to avoid heavy combat. He wanted to avoid giving the enemy the chance to analyze her, and keep her fresh for the 'Inevitable Kaiju BETA Rush' he was expecting later in the battle.

Rationally, Miharu knew it was a good thing that the large Tyranids had been destroyed easily. That didn't stop her from wishing more had survived the initial attack.

What if the Captain decided she was useless before she had a chance to fight?

She sighed, shaking her head, resolving to turn her attention to something more useful.

The battle appeared to be going about as well as a commander would want. That was not to say everything was perfect; there were some problems, largely stemming from the bold size of the perimeter Michael-senpai and the Marshal had, by necessity, drawn. However, Miharu had always heard you didn't _want_ a battle to be going perfectly; it probably meant you were being set up for a trap.

Miharu hoped that wasn't the case here. Failure here would doom billions to be devoured by the ravenous invaders.

As she watched, the first of the Landing Barges appeared in the sky, swiftly moving to land. Their hatches blew open before they had even touched down, and the instant the craft settled, servitors swarmed from the openings of the massive, multi-level craft.

These were not the twisted forms of combat servitors; they were the equally twisted forms of _construction_ servitors. The least extreme of them had a minimum of two servo-arms, and many looked more like small bulldozers than anything else.

The servitors, under the oversight of Mechanicus adepts, moved to the positions where the line was planned. The machines carried a wide variety of prefabricated components, and as soon as they arrived at the flagged locations, they began to assemble them.

It was like watching an army of giant mechanical ants. As Windrunner Squadron and the Seraphim Radiant held off the Tyranids, in some cases only a few hundred yards forward, the Servitors began assembling a defensive line.

The Tyranids opened fire on the servitors, of course, but did little actual damage. As Miharu understood it, most of the ranged weapons used by the smaller Tyranid creatures were intended more for mass suppressive fire during the terminal stages of an assault than for trading fire with the enemy. They generally had short effective ranges, and many of those that hit had lost the energy needed to penetrate the metal wrapping the Imperial construction servitors.

And of course, the Tyranids needed to take pressure off of the Astartes to attack the servitors.

That usually proved fatal.

And so, as the multi-layered defensive line took shape, Miharu waited.

[x]

Cynthia stood in the eye of a maelstrom, directing it as though she was conducting a world-class orchestra. Saying that she piloted a Tactical Surface Fighter and commanded thirty-five drones would be misleading.

She commanded a Titan which happened to have weapons mounted at thirty-six independent locations on the battlefield.

Tyranids, focusing on defeating one group of drones, or a nearby group of Astartes, were swiftly engaged by another group of drones, or Cynthia herself. Her blaster and bomber drones, with their ability to attack from well outside of line of sight, excelled in that role.

The shifting-interlocking defense was simple in concept, but daunting in execution; a week ago, Cynthia would have said it was impossible.

But there she was.

The strategy turned the unified collective consciousness of the Tyranids against them. While under synapse control, the dominant organism in the Direct Command Chain of a Tyranid group directed all of the others, but the subordinate organisms had their own independent through suppressed. Therefore, a give swarm of Tyranids could either benefit from their trademark coordination, or think about more than one thing at a time, but not both. Cynthia had a similar weakness, by the reflexive nature of the low-level aspects of her strategy alerted that.

Ironically, the Tyranids might have been able to overwhelm her if they acted outside of Synapse control. After all, it isn't the the next best fencer that the greatest swordsman alive fears.

Cynthia glanced at the defensive line under construction, ordering a shredder drone to reduce a brood of Termagants to ribbons with a flicker of thought as she did so. After a moment, she sighed, watching Lily drop seven assorted Tyrannofexes with a series of blindingly fast and impossibly accurate shots.

The wall, constructed in twenty minutes under live fire, was something incredible, as was the ability with which Lily employed her weaponry.

Cynthia couldn't even come close.

Cynthia had never created anything. She had improved, built on her family wealth and power before becoming a Surface Pilot, but she had only used things she already had. The isolation and sleepless nights that had entailed were nowhere near the same level as Lily spending half her life on the Battlefield, or Dresden defying the Mechanicum to improve human technology.

In the military, she was decent at communications and coordination, but merely an adequate pilot and officer.

Shaking her head, Cynthia sat up straighter in her seat. This was not the time for rumination.

[x]

A consciousness stirred.

It was buried deep in the sprawling Tyranid Hive Complex, though it was integrated so thoroughly into the massive chimeric _thing_ that, at a glance, it could be mistaken for simply another isolated macro-organ.

That, however, would be backwards.

For this consciousness was the most important thing on the planet, the mind and mother of every living on the world.

However, some of the half-living prey were causing it some irritation.

The Norn Queen was nameless, for such things were the trappings of lesser things, those too caught up in their own identities to realize they were no more than parts in a quasi-living whole. Nothing like the wisdom know to the living. Her kind, unlike all others, was truly alive, for only they could react and change to match and overcome a changing universe.

And yet despite that, the prey organisms had already disrupted her intended timeline for this planet.

The Norn Queen had anticipated that large-scale active resistance would cease within thirty-one planetary rotations, and that the last survivors of the dominant prey species would be liquidated within perhaps seventy more. Once that was done, the necessary organisms to truly begin consuming the planet would be grown.

Incidentally, devouring a planetary biosphere was nowhere near as easy as most of the memories the Queen had found when dissecting the minds of prey-things indicated they believed. It was an enormously energy-intensive process, and considering they seemed to think that the Hive Fleet would actually take entire oceans with it, she wondered how they maintained such delusions. It should have been _obvious_ that most of the water boiled away into space as the atmosphere was stripped away to feed the gas mines grown on the engorged Hive Ships in orbit.

The Norn Queen had already begun the growth of the organisms required, but she had been forced to cannibalize many of them after her premiere assault and siege swarms had been wiped out over the course of an afternoon.

To add insult to injury, while the prey had been unable to prevent her forces from recovering the biomass of the lost organisms, the made up for it by scattering what they called Iodine-131 over most of the areas dense with recoverable organic material. It posed no real chemical danger to any of her creature, so when the swarms of collectors, organisms the prey called Rippers, came across the material, they devoured it for processing just like everything else.

Two days later, more than nine-tenths of her Forward Gestation Areas were rotting in the sun. The novelty of the situation, combined with the loss of infrastructure and precision strikes by the prey creatures, crippled her response, and an unacceptably massive quantity of material was lost to simple decay.

And while she was keeping up a strong front and keeping pressure on the enemy, the Norn Queen now estimated that it could be more than three hundred planetary rotations before the consumption of the biosphere could begin.

This was made worse by the fact that, as her sister queens had been eager to point out, this was not simply a matter of consuming this planet. The vanguard infiltrators had gained a fairly clear picture of the region of space spinward of the Hive Fleet, and had identified a world heavily populated and developed by the local prey. It formed the linchpin of the regional defenses, and taking it could allow the harvest of more than two hundred worlds. This planet was to provide the resources to make that happen.

And now that was in jeopardy.

The Norn Queen felt a rising anger, as much a product of her own frustration as it was an effect of the hundreds of thousands of creatures fighting and dying under her psychic command, an effect she was resisting much less than usual.

This had to end _now_.

[x]

Private First Class David Sek pressed the secondary trigger of his Mark XVI Near-Ultraviolet Repeating Battle Lasrifle, triggering the underslung combi-flamer cartridge. He swept the weapon through a long arc, creating a wall of liquid fire between himself and the charging Tyranid Gaunts. The stream of fire was short-lived, but it was enough to beat back the assault, at least for the moment.

The low rumbling of artillery fire formed a quick, irregular rhythm over the sounds of battle. The heavy guns, mounted in Drop Pods rather than vehicles or carriages, were stemming the tide of Tyranid reinforcements flowing up the peninsula. The battle had been raging for hours now, and the artillery was probably the only reason the Imperial forces had yet to be annihilated.

David felt a shift in the wind, and the ash at his feet began to stir. He looked up.

Perhaps more accurately, the artillery was one of _two_ reasons.

A massive form, a humanoid ten times the height of a man, landed in the middle of the Tyranids forming up for the next wave assault. The shining red trimming of its armor seemed almost luminous as it began to pour streams of silver fire onto the monsters at its feet.

It was beyond simply amazing.

For once, it seemed as though the monster fought for the cause of man.

David shook his head, reaching down to his belt and grabbing a fresh power pack for his lasgun. Even as he did so, hastily re-purposed construction servitors moved forward, laden with fresh ammunition, explosives, and supplies for the troops on the line, especially the squad automatic and crew-served heavy weapons. Those were the cornerstones of the defense, and their ammo supplies were stretched to the limit. In a normal Guard formation, without the servitors, he doubted they could have held out.

He wondered why no one had ever come up with the idea before.

[x]

Horatius frowned. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

The currents of the Warp were stirring, beginning to move with purpose, as they did in the first stage of the manifestation of a psychic power, but on a truly massive scale. There was also a sort of 'push' on the warp currents, as though the Warpstuff was being influenced by some immaterial entity rather than simply being reeled in by the efforts of a Psyker.

He could count the number of entities known to be able to create such an effect on one hand. Without his thumb.

"Captain Horatius to all units." He said, opening a link to his Marines, the Titan pilots, and the Guard company commanders. "I'm sensing a major psychic disturbance from the main Hive. If-"

He was cut off as the currents of the Warp suddenly shifted. Energy began to pour into the Hive, like an entire ocean being drained away.

There was stillness for a moment.

Then one of the sections of the Hive Complex, striped of chitin armor and left smoldering by Imperial bombardment, began to smoke more profusely. It quickly vanished behind shifting banks of smog, and for a moment, Captain Horatius was uncertain of what the enemy was attempting.

But only for a moment.

"Large-scale enemy unit inbound." He said quickly, reaching out into the Warp and attempting to get a better idea of just what was coming. "ETA... Now."

A flash of sickly green fire erupted from the Hive, clearing the smoke and revealing a rough, circular hole in the biostructure a full twenty meters across.

A heartbeat later, a massive, chitinous hand shot out of the Hive and grabbed the rim of the tunnel exit, claws digging into the material. Another followed, then a third and fourth.

The claws dug deeper into the material, and the Tyranid Norn Queen appeared. In a single motion assisted by a massive discharge of psychic power, the monster launched itself out of the hole and into the air.

In the moment the Queen seemed to hang in defiance of gravity, Horatius' enhanced senses allowed him to get a regrettably good look at the monster.

The Norn Queen had an extended, spearpoint-shaped head, the front half split by a large maw lined with haphazard layers of teeth and the upper section adorned with eleven glowing red eyes. The head was supported by a thick neck lined with layers of overlapping scales, which terminated at the rough point where the creature became a nightmare.

So far as Horatius could tell, the main body of the Norn Queen was a long and relatively thin snake-like shape in the standard colors of Hive Fleet Leviathan, seventy-some meters total with the head and neck. That was more or less commonplace.

However, it appeared that dozens, if not hundreds, of other organisms had been grafted on to the main body; four pairs of trunk-line legs almost draconic in appearance alongside two dozen thinner, insectile pairs. The four arms it had used to lift itself from the Hive were grafted near the front, and dozens of other arm- and tentacle-like appendages were attached along the body. Biocannon mounts were attached on the spinal ridge of the main body, and in between arms on the flanks, like the broadsides of a warship. A single cannon of rather excessive size was grafted to the end of the main body, creating an impression of some sort of kaleidoscopic daemonic scorpion taller than a Warhound Titan.

The Norn Queen twisted in the air, bringing its stinger-cannon to bear on the forces of the Imperium. It fired, and three yellow-green streaks of crystallized and electrically charged explosive acid landed somewhere inside the human perimeter.

Then the screaming started.

[x]

Michael charged forward, routing every watt of power he could coax out of his reactor to propulsion. He was, in defiance of the designers' intent, most of the TSF piloting regulations, and _common sense_ , using his primary lift drives for horizontal thrust, adding their immense power to his normal thrusters and jump units while making up for the lack of vertical lift by, essentially, kicking off the ground.

In a word, it was a moronic maneuver. Without the direct neural interface system he would have crashed almost immediately, and the supercarbon-alloy frame of an ordinary TSF would have quickly failed under the strain.

But he managed.

When the Norn Queen emerged from the Hive, Michael was already in motion. And as the Queen raised its stinger cannon and fired, he jumped, barely aware of the acceleration pressing him into his Command Throne in the depths of his command trance.

As Michael redirect power away from his legs and dialed his thrusters to maximum, the Tyranid Queen seemed to realize what he was trying to do. Its massive head turned to face him, but it was still in freefall, and its options were limited. Aerial grappling is not a prime consideration for most sane designers. The Queen tried to bring guns to bear, but the few able to draw a bead splashed harmlessly off his Void Shield.

In the last few moments before impact, he cut his engines, dropped his forward Void Shields, and raised his arms to a forearm block, surging his structural reinforcement fields and energy bracing as high as they would go.

Then he impacted the Norn Queen. Michael struck the creature near the middle of its body, feeling a rather incomparable shock run through him. Later, he would wonder if he hadn't momentarily blacked out; he'd been expecting far more soul-crushing agony.

The moment after he made contact, Michael dialed all his drive systems back to maximum. The Tyranid Matriarch was enormous, but the engines of Michael's Titan were sufficient to lift it against planetary gravity and propel it at supersonic speeds.

So, almost painfully slowly, the Norn Queen began to slide away from the Imperial line.

The Empress and The Fool, suspended miles over the earth, took an eternity to fall. After all, gravity pulls without regard to scale.

Michael watched his altimeter tick down, along with the timer to impact. When it reached 2.5 seconds, he took a deep breath and swung his legs forward, kicking off the Norn Queen and bringing his jump units into position to push him clear of the monster. The Tyranid Queen struck the ground like an eighty-meter mass of bone, chitin, and meat impacting hard dirt at a significant fraction of the local speed of sound. Flaring his lift drives, Michael made a tolerable landing shortly thereafter.

The details of the Norn Queen were hard to make out through the cloud of dust it had kicked up with its impact, but Michael doubted that the creature had been disabled by the impact; it had chosen to jump from the Hive Complex on its own. But maybe-

Something, a sort of tentacle, shot out of the cloud. It paused just long enough for Michael to feel something _wrong_ about it, and then realize that the club tip of the tentacle was cloaked in a haze of sickly yellow light.

Then it shot forward again, dealing a sharp uppercut blow to the thorax of Michael's machine, impacting with several dozen times the kinetic energy an object of its mass and velocity should have possessed.

Michael felt the attack connect, and for a moment everything turned to _pain_ as his Titan was knocked into the air. He sat in the center of a vortex of damage warnings and threat indicators, trying to bring _something_ under control, guided by reflex more than thought.

He hit the ground.

It was awful, even more than it should have been.

As he tried to catch his breath, Michael scanned through system readouts and internal sensor feeds. He'd managed to deploy the crash skids on his mount pylons and bend his knees, saving his jump units, but that was really the only good news. His chestplate was still intact, technically speaking, but the shock had damaged several core systems nonetheless.

Of course, none of that mattered. One of the coolant/containment blocks on his core reactor had been knocked out of alignment by the attack, compromising the carefully balanced field that contained the miniscule star of fusing plasma at the heart of the reactor, and it had been forced to execute an emergency shutdown to avoid catastrophic failure.

And without power, he was helpless.

He had come full circle.

[x]

Captain Horatius frowned as he felt the psychic discharge from the Norn Queen's attack wash over him and, as he saw the leader of the 'Titans' fall, felt a flicker of what a person unfamiliar with the Adeptus Astartes might have called fear. It wasn't the largest sorcerous attack he'd come across, but it was quite possibly the largest expenditure of power to simply hit something he'd ever seen.

The Norn Queen was cloaked in a hundred raging torrents of psionic power, woven together into a deadly curtain of impossible geometries. He could feel the Norn Queen gathering power, preparing to begin the annihilation of the Imperial forces.

Horatius raised his sword, channeling psychic energy into the weapon. As he leveled the weapon at the distant Queen, he discharged a bolt of psionic energy concentrated and bound down to needle focus.

To an outside observer, it would most likely appear that nothing had happened. The lance of power, miniscule compared to that of the Norn Queen, struck the mesh of power the monster was weaving, smashing the intersection of half a dozen threads and discharging their power in an instant.

Creating something was always harder than destroying it.

But sometimes that was a good thing.

Horatius fired a second bolt of power, then a third and fourth. It would greatly erode the Norn Queen's psionic powers, but do nothing to harm it directly. With the Tyranids pressing the line almost everywhere, it was all the help he could give.

It would have to be enough.

[x]

Michael watched as the Norn Queen stalked out of the dust cloud, eyes ablaze. It had taken its time coming to finish him, though nothing he'd tried had made even the slightest difference.

And now he was about to die.

He closed his eyes, feeling tears run down to his cheeks. It was, he supposed, only fair. His time had come that morning in Normandy; what came next was simply an extension.

But it had been for nothing. Once again, he had failed. But this time, his actions meant something. His failure damned a billion souls, dooming them to be devoured by these monstrosities.

Abruptly, Michael laughed. It was a sad, empty, pitiful sound, the reaction of a condemned man to being told he'd won the lottery.

When he'd arrived in this world, awful though it was, some part of him had been excited. Some piece of him had been _glad_. He, his actions had significance.

Here, he could make a difference.

He supposed he'd shown the sum total worth of Princeps-Colonel, Captain, Michael Black.

 _So, you decide to simply give up?_

Michael though he saw motion at the edge on one of his functioning displays, but without sensors or comms, he had no way of getting a better look.

 _The Night has come for you, and you let it take you?_

Without warning, Miharu sprang from somewhere outside his field of view, swords draw and armor aglow, dashing impossibly fast to place herself between Michael and the Norn Queen. The Tyranid brought down a hammer-like claw, but it was deflected, knocked to the side as Miharu stepped into the attack. Her other sword flashed, severing the next appendage to reach for her.

 _You gave her something infinitely precious. Would you now betray her?_

Michael's eyes widened. He felt like something was speaking to him. An ancient voice, vast and wise. Stern and powerful. Warm and fatherly.

As one of the Norn Queen's tentacle-arms dealt a blow to Miharu's side, Michael remembered a passage from Sunmaker's memoirs.

 _Death for a man and destruction for an army are the only two failures from which one cannot recover_ , the Bloody-Handed Savior had said. _As long as one can continue to struggle, some sliver of home remains. I could have taken the easy option and made a heroic last stand on the Nile, or at Alexandria or Tripoli or Algiers or Gibraltar. But at the end of the day, that would have been the doom of this continent, and perhaps all of humanity. When playing for the highest stakes possible, any cost is preferable to allowing the fight to end._

Miharu was still fighting. Melissa and Natasha, Cynthia and Lily, Keter and Sigrid. Somehow, he knew none of them had given up yet.

And if he was going to die, he owned it to them to face the Night with eyes wide open. He looked up at his wide-angle emergency display.

"So come and take me." Michael said, strength leaking back into his. "You xenomorph _bitch_."

Then he felt a sudden shock, like he had been dipped in liquid helium, shortly followed by the feeling of needles _everywhere_. Everything was gone.

And then, for a single point in time, he saw _everything_. It was too much for him to comprehend, but he could feel it resonate with him.

He could feel that something had changed.

A soft hum filled his cockpit, and the status indicator lights clicked on as the monitors began to reactivate. Michael could feel his control systems restoring, like regaining a feeling in a limb ten times the size of his own body. He could feel something else, like a star in his mind and a storm in his blood, but he'd decided it was presently irrelevant.

The Norn Queen launched a straight jab with a hammer claw, clipping Miharu and knocking her back. In the same moment, Michael's maneuver jets flared, lifting his machine to its feet as his main drives roared to life.

The titan regained its footing. In defiance of its brush with annihilation, its armor appeared practically luminescent, radiant silver and rich crimson. It was still for a moment.

Then columns of light burst from its back, radiating out like sunbeams. Tendrils wove between them as they flared, bent, and merged, spinning an intricate filigree which, within seconds, became so dense as to be practically solid.

Michael shifted his stance, flexing the wings of light on his back.

He would fight.

[x]

Lily's eyes widened as she watched Michael stand up and spread wings of light. They were giving her sensor system a fit; it had no idea what to make of them.

To be fair, neither did she. The energy output was impressive, though.

A brood of Gaunts and Warriors arrived, called away from the main lines by their Queen. They boiled across the broken ground, living instruments of death at the ready.

It took six seconds for the last of them to become ash.

"Michael." She muttered, reminding herself to breath. "Who is like God?"

The meaning of the name was a challenge, directed at those guilty of the highest arrogance, and a promise that they would be cast down. The title of the Archangel of War. In that moment, she could think of nothing more fitting.

"Windrunner Squadron." Michael said, speaking into the tactical network. "This is it. We have our primary objective."

Connecting everything, it took Lily a moment to recognize the strange quality of Michael's voice. She had no idea how to describe it; he sounded like he was a judge passing sentence whose words were also on fire.

"Miharu, you're point. Keep the Queen fixed. Don't let it reach our lines." He slid to the side as he spoke, raising his rifles. "Cynthia, you have crowd control. We can't afford to have the drones swarm us. Keep you platforms alive as best you can. Sigrid, you help her. Keep the air clear."

"Yes sir!" Miharu said, stepping back and shifting to a defensive stance.

"I'm on it, Captain." Cynthia replied.

"Understood." Sigrid said, gaining altitude as arcs of lightning began to crawl over the obsidian skin of her titan.

"Melissa, hamstring."

"Roger roger." She replied, sounding almost bloodthirsty as her machine faded from view.

"Keter, you cover support. Keep us alive." Michael opened fire, the resulting stream of rifle fire triggering a maelstrom of iridescent ripples on the now-visible shield a meter from the Norn Queen's hide. "Natasha and Lily, focus on bringing it down. It's a sort of chimera; most of the weapons and limbs are separate organisms. Kill them and they can't regenerate."

Lily swallowed. "On it."

She zoomed her targeting scope in on the Tyranid Queen as Michael cut the link.

"Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teaches my hands to the war, and my fingers to fight."

The first shot struck the shield and was deflected in a storm of insane color. The second one reduced one of the biocannons lining the spine to pulp.

[x]

Natasha swung out in a wide arc along the flank of the bug princess, weaving to avoid the occasional biocannon volley. Despite the fact that the Norn Queen was putting out a terrifyingly impressive volume of fire, there were far fewer shots actually threatening Natasha than she would have expected. The formation had spread out around the Queen, and Miharu had continued fighting it in close quarters.

Maybe commanding two major battles, tracking and targeting six separate high-speed contacts and trying to locate another invisible enemy while fighting a psychotic Japanese midget with Death Swords was straining the Queen's multitasking capabilities. Go figure.

As she approached her chosen firing position, Natasha stowed Aurora Accelerator and drew her assault cannons from her thigh locks as she readied her energy projectors. She hadn't had many opportunities to use them; they were powerful single-target weapons, but their massive energy draw made them horrifically inefficient against the sort of hordes the Tyranids were so fond of.

But in this case...

"Lily!" Natasha said, opening the channel. "Can I get a breacher on ventral turret R3?"

"Headed your way. Five seconds." Lily said, responding almost immediately. "Oh, and uh, danger close, I think."

Natasha cut power to her engines and landed on her feet, settling into a run. It would save power, and she wanted to make sure she had enough to get away after firing. Falling on her face and getting swarmed would be humiliating, to say the very least.

A line of fire reached down from a burned-out upper section of the Hive Complex, striking the shields of the Norn Queen in a miniature nova of white-hot sparks. Natasha adjusted her aim slightly, moving the head of her titan to line her energy projectors up with the exact impact point of Lily's shot, and fired.

Twin rays of light, blinding white tinged with red and orange, lanced across the space between Natasha and the Tyranid Queen in an instant. They struck the beleaguered shields of the Norn Queen, shattered them, and stuck the monster itself.

The energy projector beams punched through the carapace of the beast like icepicks and tore into the biocannon mount below. Tissue vanished as water flashed to vapor and proteins burned to nothing. The surviving carapace contained the resulting overpressure for an instant before it ruptured, detonating with explosive force and blasting slivers of chitin into the surrounding organisms.

Natasha scowled as she looked though the damage estimates. The biocannon, which had provided a considerable fraction of the Norn Queen's firepower on its right flank, had been destroyed. There was no possibility of it regenerating, on account of the fact that it been completely vaporized, and several surrounding sections had also suffered significant damage.

She had nearly a full second to congratulate herself before the retaliatory fire arrived.

The Queen's stinger cannon was the first to fire, and for a moment Natasha's world became a corrosive electrochemical hellstorm punctuated by the warning tones of Void Shield failures. As shots from the secondary cannons began impacting her armor directly, Natasha activated her main drives and flared her reverse thrusters, skewing her jump units for evasive maneuvers.

The rate of impacts slowed, and Natasha's eyes narrowed as red hit indicators appeared on her readouts. She wasn't close to suffering core system damage, but she could very easily die without that happening. She was playing Icarus, and all the Queen needed to do was disrupt the regenerative cooling system on her jetpack.

As the Queen turned, sensing weakness and bringing more biocannons to bear, Natasha grimaced. She was working to escape, but one of the tradeoffs of the Su37's superior Soviet engineering was an inability to use its jump units to provide ventral thrust; moving closer to the Queen would be ill-advised, but turning to flee would expose present thinner armor and less effective shield arrays. It was-

"Engaging."

Natasha switched to a peripheral feed as the intensity of fire around her abruptly plummeted.

Keter was charging the Norn Queen. She was moving at an Oblique angle to the bulk of the monster, dancing across the ground with lift drives engaged just barely enough to suspend the weight of her machine, moving with an almost inhumanly precise mathematical drunkenness as she raked the Queen with wide fans of Galvanic Cascade fire. It was the Laserjagd Combat Spasm, the fighting style developed by the soldiers charged with engaging the most dangerous BETA strains ever encountered head-on. Keter seemed to have adapted it perfectly; the Queen's psionic shields produced a flare of energy and a fountain of sparks

"Stand down for shield recovery." Keter said, voice giving no indication of her situation. "I am boosting your field condenser and accumulator systems performance and Aether Sink throughput. Reengage when your defenses are restored."

"Uh... how?" Natasha said, moving away from the queen and shedding altitude. Her void shields were recovering much faster than normal, and her core temperature was also dropping faster than she would have thought possible.

"Excellent question." Keter said. "I'd like a concrete answer as well. I believe the machine spirits are highly relevant, however."

Natasha landed outside what appeared to be the Norn Queen's immediate engagement radius and was quiet for a moment as she tried to digest the events of the past few minutes. Then she grimaced and started moving on foot, following the edge of the crater. As desperately as she wanted to stop and think, she needed to stay in the fight, and she was terrified that the storm building for the past week would break the moment she allow herself to look at it head on.

She looked back at her thermal telltales, then her shield displays. It wasn't as if they were more than the second weirdest things that had happened today.

[x]

Michael watched the latest volley of biocannon fire approch, seeming to glide through the air in defiance of the normal laws of motion. They were moving at their normal speed, of course, Michael had simply become faster.

That wasn't to say the barrage wasn't a threat; the shells were still by no means slow, and there were a _lot_ of them. The Norn Queen had adopted a barrage fire tactic, enormously increasing the difficulty of dodging via simple saturation.

So instead of trying, Michael stood his metaphorical ground, raised his assault cannon, and opened fire. Silver lightning reached out in razor-straight lines, shattering venom cannon crystals and splattering bioplasma blasts. Most of the shots missed, but the five-round bursts Michael assigned to each projectile were sufficient to destroy the vast majority of them.

As the rest closed, Michael closed his wings. Each projectile approached, surface temperature skyrocketing, until it disrupted the field maintaining the integrity of one of the 'feathers' of plasma layered together to form the outer bulk of each wing.

When that happened, the shell was struck by what could be described as a solar flare in extreme miniature, the force of the explosive ablation knocking away anything that remained solid.

Michael dropped out of the resulting cloud of debris, flaring his wings open, and attacked.

Dozens of feathers detached from each wing and streaked toward and unusually large ground of lower Tyranids moving toward the Imperial line, each one a fusion-tipped arrow of Apollo. Individually, they impacted with devastating power, collectively they produced an overwhelming wave of heat and pressure that permitted no escape.

Even before the strike impacted, Michael was already clearing the datum and beginning evasive maneuvers. He had a finite number of feathers available, and could only replace so many of them each second. He'd learned quickly that such a dramatic attack left him vulnerable; several burnt gouges scoring his chest armor testified to that.

He fired a series of plasma impeller turbopenetrator rounds, stressing the Norn Queen's shielding and allowing one of the final rounds to make contact, reducing a secondary cannon to a bloody mess.

Michael grimaced, allowing a thin trickle of blood to run down his chin.

It wasn't enough. Whatever had changed, the power he'd gained had allowed the human forces to rally against the victory the Queen had very nearly won without even engaging, but it wasn't enough. They'd be able to fight for a time, consume the Queen's attention and allow the soldiers here and in the diversionary assaults to reap a dreadful harvest of the enemy as command and coordination broke down, and then they would die, and then the men of the assault force would die, and then the rest of the planet would follow, perhaps able to hold a bit longer in exchange for their sacrifice.

Closing his eyes, Michael tasted iron, feeling the various damages... injuries, perhaps, covering the front and sides of his Titan. Maybe there was one chance. Lee and Gettysburg. Scipio at Zama. Put everything left on one last role of the dice, and do everything in his power to execute it to perfection.

But with damage accumulating by the minute... he would have to move _now_.

Resolving himself, a plan unfolded in his mind almost immediately. Maybe the route to victory was, if not easy, at least obvious. Maybe he'd seen most of it already.

"Melissa?" He said, limiting the channel to audio transmission. "We need to silence the tail cannon. Can you do it?"

"I think... Yes, sir." She responded. "Give me ninety seconds."

The intermittent contact Michael had designated as Melissa vanished.

"Miharu? How are you holding up?"

It took her a moment to answer. "Fine, sir."

Michael was looking at her damage readouts, and the list of sub-nominal components was remarkably similar to the list of components in a Shiranui Second. Redundancy was a virtue, but then so was honesty.

"In ninety seconds, I'm going to need a feint attack. I-"

"Yes, sir." Miharu said. "I understand. I'll see it through."

"Don't get yourself killed. That's an order."

"Sir?"

"You deserve better." Michael muttered absently, already running through the legwork for the next trick.

He shook his head and opened a channel to the other five soldiers in his command.

"I've started a broadcast timer." He began. "When it hits zero, I need everyone in position to immediately start laying down harassing fire. Lily, focus on the head section. Everyone else is to cover the rest. Sigrid and Natasha go right, Cynthia and Keter go left. Don't pass up on targets of opportunity, but be on time. After that... go wild."

One by one, they responded in the affirmative. It would have been wonderful to have more time with them, to try and be a leader of the skill and character they deserved. But...

Michael looked at the timer and smiled. "Windrunner actual out."

A few heartbeats later, Melissa attacked.

He couldn't completely follow what happened next. Michael saw her drop her cloak just short of the Queen, then launch forward in a blur of motion. Then there was an immense explosion of ichor, and the Norn Queen seemed to _roll_ , moving a battery of biocannons to bear. They fired, and Melissa's IFF vanished again.

With no moment to recover, Miharu sprang forward, severed the first two limbs to attack her, and began pressing forward into the subsequent assault a mere moment before Lily fired.

The first line of burning air traced from behind the Queen to a shield over a portion of its neck, and the second would have struck the back of the thing's head. Then the entire monster was enveloped in a blazing shroud of iridescent energy as the other four opened fire.

Michael charged forward, approaching on the same axis as Miharu. He sprang into the air, passed over the head of her machine, discharged nearly half the accumulated plasma in his wings into the limbs attacking her and the Queen behind them, and accelerated.

He struck the shield of the Norn Queen, slowed, and was through. Even before his vision cleared, he raised his rifles and opened fire as the Norn Queen recoiled, spraying energized metal into its armored throat as he accelerated upward, feeling ichor splashing onto the skin of his Titan.

A moment later, and he reached the head. The blazing emerald-green eyes of his war engine met their counterparts in the arrowhead face of the Norn Queen.

Something flickered between them.

And in that moment, Michael felt he had begun to truly understand his foe. He sense a hunger, vast beyond human understanding, extending out from the Norn Queen; in a very real way, the monster in front of him was simply a regent of that hunger. It was a monstrous _thing_ , beyond any simple need for physical sustenance; a need not simply to be more, but for everything else in existence to be less, to be gone, for there to be nothing else.

The hunger, now, was alloyed with hatred. Hate for the lesser things that not simply defied the natural order and their place in it, but that had dared _take_ from the hunger. There was an impotent rage at the efficiency with which they'd done so; Windrunner Squadron eliminating the largest threats to the tanks, so they could eliminate the greatest threats to the infantry, and _particularly_ Dresden's little trick with the Iodine.

The exchange occurred in an instant, and almost immediately, Michael could feel a pressure at the edges of his mind, an all-out attack psychic attack by a monster whose will devoured realms and worlds.

As he fortified his mind, Michel flared his dives one last time, launching his machine up and over the head of the Norn Queen. He cut lift and redlined every maneuver jet he had, bring himself about-face and down to land on one knee on the Norn Queen's back.

He thrust his right arm out to the side, and his wing enveloped it, narrowing and extending into a blade of pure radiance. Michael closed his eyes, everything becoming perfectly clear, and gave a single command.

"End now."

The Norn Queen obeyed, and the war for Gellion II was concluded.

[x]

Lord Marshal Alberich Vesperia exhaled softly, dispersing the curls of steam gathered over his cup of cocoa. It was the sort of borderline-Slaaneshi Biologis-enhanced precision-manufactured extra-rich concoction the he only allowed himself at the conclusion of a successful campaign. He took a sip.

"Excellent as always, Walter." He said.

"Thank you, sir." Walter responded. "I am glad that the preparation of a beverage remains within my abilities."

Alberich shrugged. "On the whole, I'd say we performed adequately here. Most likely in the top fifty percent of Guard formations indexed by hypothetical performance."

"I question your word choice, sir. I believe _exemplary_ might better describe our performance here. Milord gives far too much credit to his peers."

Alberich frowned. "We got lucky. Three times. The... Windrunner Squadron appearing, the Astartes, and then... Whatever it was that happened at the Central Hive."

"On the contrary, I don't believe one formation in twenty with fewer than a million men under arms would have been able to utilize such windfalls to the extent we did here."

"Still, it just seems so... convenient. Too much for my taste."

Walter said nothing for a moment. "I would hesitate to judge so quickly, sir. These events are certainly unusual, but... Fitting, in a sense."

Alberich raised an eyebrow.

"Conservation, sir." Walter said. "It's a recurring trend in the physical sciences. It is exceedingly difficult to actually change anything when considering a sufficient scope; with the requisite volume of energy, you can manufacture negative charge by producing electrons, but you must generate a like number of their equal and opposite equivalents, and produce the same amount of positive charge."

"Oh?"

"Much the absoluteness of these principals breaks down when the Immaterium is consider, but often more because the warp can be used to circumvent or discard a reaction than anything else. However, the concept of balance... in a thematic sense, is even strong. Power comes at a price."

Walter grinned slightly. "So, I wouldn't say that we were overdue for a break. Simply that our enemies are owed no small bit of disaster."

[x]

Hydrargyrum Dresden had almost forgotten what it was like to be as excessively tired as he was. He needed little rest, but had gotten none during the lead-up to the attack, and had been too busy managing depot-level repairs and logistics for the advance, among other things, to have taken any rest cycles since.

"How did you even _get_ there?" He asked, looking longwise at the young navy officer on the screen in front of him.

"That's not important." Lieutenant Tavar Gaius Augustus said, rather quickly. "What is important is that I took a look at the Norn Queen after Michael took a bit off the top, and I found something rather interesting."

"What?"

"So, the Queen was essentially a biological processing and data management center for the whole of the local swarm. That takes a lot of raw power, and it turns out that she had a _lot_ of auxiliary brain modules built into her body to handle the load. And on closer inspection, most of them weren't even dead yet."

"Past tense?" Dresden said, in what passed for an ominous tone among the Mechanicus.

"Well, they are now." Tavi said. "I borrowed a bunch of your people, sorry about that, and stuck a bunch of electrodes into them, then ran stimulation mapping and response processing until they expired. Then we started engram mining. That was messy in a way I'm not at all sure words can do justice."

"But... Extracting _anything_ from a properly conditioned prisoner requires a specialized facility and-"

"Right. But those are human prisoners, but human brains are messy and use an incredibly intricate distributed interconnected system. The Queen was built from the ground up for efficiency; a localized, linear system can be grown and maintained much more easily. Combined with the fact that the layout was much more rational..."

"How much did you get?" Dresden asked, unable to fully conceal his excitement.

"Hard to say." Tavi said. "We haven't actually come back yet because we had to appropriate the navigation and flight assistance cogitators on the landers when we ran out of storage."

Dresden said nothing.

"We haven't made much headway on interpretation just yet; a creature like this will experience the world in a rather unique manner, so 'translating' it is going to take time. But I'm confident it's going to be a gold mine. As an appetizer..."

An image appeared on Dresden's display. It looked a bit like a plate of noodles.

"When you said appetizer-"

"Sorry." Tavi said. "We needed to make some modifications to the storage files. How about now?"

The image changed to a star chart, showing an enormous area of Ultima Segmentum with a number of systems, several hundred at a minimum, connected by thin yellow lines, each with a red arrow at some point along the line.

"We've identified the next few systems where the Tyranids will arrive in the area." Tavi said. "The arrival dates have a pretty wide range of uncertainty; we've got almost exact dates for some, others we've gotten down to plus or minus a few months."

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"I'm not sure how helpful this is going to be." Tavi said. "But as a Navy man, I have a few ideas."

[x]

Farseer Ashalaria looked up at the object suspended in the re-purposed hanger. It was generally cylindrical, twice her height in diameter and several times longer, vaguely tapered, and made of several different Wraithbone composites, plus a number of other odds and ends.

"We are ready to begin, Farseer." He chief Bonesinger, Sevelivia, said. "On your order?"

Ashalaria nodded. Sevelivia tapped an activation crystal.

A brilliant plume of ethereal sky-blue plasma appeared, blasting into open space from the narrow end of the cylindrical device, shot through with faint ribbons and streams of indigo and scarlet.

"Thrust is climbing steadily." One of the specialists announced, glancing up from his display. "Averaging twelve percent above projected yield, within two percent of expected curve."

Ashalaria allowed herself a sort of half-smile. She was extremely, inappropriately, giddy. The plasma thruster was actually working. It would allow a ship to actually operate in the outer regions of a system, not only vastly increasing the number of available Webway gates, but also allowing the vessel to carry actual _armor_. She wouldn't have to worry about tripping and falling though the exterior hull, or leaning against a wall and comprising the frame's pressure integrity. It would-

The windows into the test bay went white for an instant, then completely black as the emergency polarization kicked in.

"The prototype... Exploded." Sevelivia said slowly. "I'm not sure what..."

"Actually, I think I have an idea what happened." The propulsion specialist said.

Ashalaria nodded.

"I believe the additional force exerted on the plasma on in the primary acceleration chamber, between the generators and the expansion plenum, caused an unexpected increase in working pressure." He said. "This raised in the rate of fusion; from the recorded data, I believe the result was a runaway acceleration of the reaction in the plenum chamber, leading to a catastrophic system failure."

Sevelivia shot him a glare. "Did you not-"

"The possibility occurred to me previously. I did not believe it was significant concern; I'd expected the flow drop to cancel out the effect."

"Well, now we've-"

"Gained priceless experimental data." Ashalaria said, cutting her off. "Failures are an important part of the experimental process. They illuminate your errors and design flaws; now we know another thing to _not_ do. Besides, I believe we still generated enough data to improve our design for the next test."

She smiled. So this was what it felt like to have a purpose.

[x]

Acolyte Jed bowed as his lord approached along the narrow catwalk running down the middle of the artificial cavern.

"Milord, I-"

"At ease." Lord Estevelin said. "There's no need for that."

"Of course, sir."

Estevelin turned to look at the right-hand wall of the chasm, the Mark of Chaos Undivided emblazoned across his breastbone seeming to heat for a moment in response to the energy coursing through it. "How go things?"

"No changes." Jeb said. "Progress is as scheduled, dissent is unchanged."

Estevelin frowned. "Perhaps they should judge me based on my _results_ rather than my adherence to orthodoxy. I wonder how many of them denounce me for likeness with the followers of the Corpse-God without knowing that they embody the greatest flaw of the servants of Him On Terra as they do so. The Irony is... amusing."

"Milord? I believe-"

"What?" Estevelin said. "I never liked the term. A corpse is dead, but more importantly lacks agency. The Emperor of Mankind may be, in a biological sense, largely deceased, but he remains a very active power in the Galaxy. Accuracy is important in all things, Jeb."

"I understand, sir."

"But really, how can they dismiss my achievements so easily?" In the past three years, the defeat and assimilation of seven major warbands. Four of them were barely even contests; my people had ten times as much ammunition, ritual components of twice the quality, and actual _armor_. Basic arbitration and policing, along with little things like _sanitation_ , have reduced baseline attrition by a factor of five, almost down to manageable levels."

"I believe the followers of Nurgle find the sanitation measures... somewhat repugnant, sir."

"That is of concern, though if they were less literal, maybe more people could stand to be within pistol range of them. The stability in the camps, the _stagnation_ , is dedicated to the Lord of Decay. Combined with the extra sacrifice allotments, the damage is largely controlled."

"By and large, sir, I believe many simply find your behavior and attitude... improper. That type of sentiment is rarely rational."

Estevelin laughed. It was deep, rich, mirthful, and nothing like what one would expect from a man currently standing well inside the Eye of Terror.

"If they believe that there is such a thing as _propriety_ for a lord of Chaos..." Estevelin grinned, clenching his fist. "Bearing witness shall be torment enough."


End file.
